Sleppe

Exhibition Sleppe, a ceramic portrait - August -October 2024

Sleppe 

Sleppe (°1953-†2020), pseudonym of Marc Van Slembrouck, was an all-round visual artist, teacher at the KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent) and an excellent ceramist and therefore an outsider in the plastic arts. There was a time when ceramics was a popular medium for many artists, but not really in our region in the last fifty years, until very recently. However, the situation in the 1980s and 1990s was more of a challenge than a limitation for the flamboyant, anarchist Sleppe. He loved life and often lost himself in it, but every time he got back up and worked. There are some milestones in his career. The beginning of his career was marked by his collaboration with Della Calberson (+) , their training with Dionyse (1921- 2013) in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the discovery in 1984 of West Coast Ceramics in the exhibition “Who's Afraid of American Pottery?” In the former Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (now Bozar) in Brussels. Later there were the happenings “Namur Bouge in 1984 and “Brick Steen” (1986-88). His oeuvre consists largely of ceramics, but painting and graphics were an important part of it in the last years of his life. The series “Symplegaden” is very typical of Sleppe's work. It is work that shows the smallness and powerlessness of man in relation to the gods, nature and man himself. And Sleppe was good at that.