Spilled Milk

Artbook:
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.
This book 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.