Paul Van Hoeydonck: Between Heaven and Earth
Paul Van Hoeydonck (1925–2025), born in Antwerp, became a pivotal figure in the post-war avant-garde. As co-founder of the G58 group, he broke with traditional forms and sought new ways to picture the world. That quest placed him in dialogue not only with the art of the past — in which he was well versed as an art historian — but above all with the future.
From the 1960s onwards, Van Hoeydonck achieved international renown with his Space Art. His sculptures and objects were not futuristic stage-sets but boyish reflections on humanity’s place in the cosmos. He conjured visions of galaxies, robots and orbital cities with a fascination for both utopia and emptiness.
Light, Emptiness and Architecture
Van Hoeydonck did not simply fill space — he let space come into being. Early in his career, he began experimenting with glass and plexiglass, materials whose reflections and light-play made the viewer part of the work. His celebrated white world was never a sterile void, but a charged field where light and darkness collide. The theme runs back to his first monochrome canvases of the 1950s.
His early plexiglass works embody that fascination. Embedded Cities (1958) is a transparent block within which planes of colour seem to float. The work itself remains unchanged, but its appearance shifts as you move around it. Van Hoeydonck toyed with perception and left room for interpretation. What do we see? A city? A cosmos? A dream?
This architectural sensibility becomes even clearer in City of the Future (1969). Here, once again, glass and plexiglass are shaped into elemental volumes that recall the blocks of a child’s construction set. The piece is a stripped-down model without detail, where humanity is conspicuous by its absence. The transparent materials evoke a still, white silence over a city yet to be discovered. A habitable zone waiting for its inhabitants. Van Hoeydonck sought, as he once put it, to reorder chaos into livable form — as an archaeologist does with the past, and a planner with the present.
Fallen Astronaut: A Universal Symbol
In 1971, Van Hoeydonck quite literally reached the moon. During the Apollo 15 mission, astronaut David Scott placed Fallen Astronaut — an aluminium figure just 8.5 cm tall — on the lunar surface. It was carried as a tribute to the fourteen astronauts and cosmonauts who had lost their lives in the early years of space exploration. Yet it was never intended as a mere memorial. Van Hoeydonck wanted to create a universal emblem of humanity: a figure without nationality, without gender.
He once summed it up with striking clarity: “Amid all the technological debris left behind in space, this is the only trace of human art.” The work demonstrates how his vision extended beyond Earth: art as a quiet, poetic presence among stars and machines.
A Legacy that Endures
On 3 May 2025, Paul Van Hoeydonck died at the age of 99. His oeuvre — straddling Antwerp’s avant-garde and international space fever, between ZERO and Panamarenko — remains vital. It merges imagination with reflection, light with emptiness, past with future.
In autumn 2025, KMSKA will present a selection of his work, an ideal opportunity to discover — or rediscover — his cosmic world. Those seeking deeper engagement will find context at M HKA. Van Hoeydonck not only prompts us to look at what is, but at what might be. His work is an invitation to look further, literally and figuratively. Space is not only up there. It is also within us.
