Hilde Overbergh - 'Spilled Milk' Book

The work of visual artist Hilde Overbergh evolves like an organism and in close connection with the everyday reality we live in. She creates paintings, sculptures, assemblages, collages, and installations, each work building on the previous one. What characterizes her above all is the use of material that is not bound by convention. Her work process starts on the streets. It is where she finds material we carelessly pass by. And it is precisely in these things where she sees a potential image. She moves what she finds from the streets to her studio, where she collects and organizes, experiments and selects. At the end of this ongoing process, an image appears that is at the same time an intensification of the world as we know it, and yet not quite. These phases of the artistic process also determine the structure of this book: the streets, the studio, and the works, all as different views on reality.

‘Spilled Milk’ covers the period of time between 2013 and 2021. It aims to visualize the coherence of an oeuvre that has grown over time, and still continues to grow. It is a book with a double perspective: it registers recent history, and it offers an open view of what is going on, and what is still to come. The images are accompanied by the essayistic writings of Frank Maes, Femke Vandenbosch, and Frits de Coninck, who look at Overbergh's artistry from personal and very different points of view, and who install her work in the context of contemporary art. Not coincidentally, the book concludes with the piece 'Try again.'

232 pages, softcover, 240x300mm, MER books