Johan Creten in Ooidonk Art Festival

18.06 – 30.08.2026
Tuesday till Sunday & festive days 2 – 7 pm

Goed Te Réables, Ooidonkdreef 5 – 9800 Bachte-Maria-Leerne project Francis Maere Fine Arts

A monumental female figure constructed from a honeycomb structure. Five bronze beehives from which human faces emerge. With La Cathédrale and Le Jardin des Simples, Johan Creten (Sint-Truiden, 1963) brings together two works in which the world of bees takes centre stage.

Creten is regarded as one of the most important Belgian sculptors of his generation. Since the 1980s, he has developed a body of work in which beauty and unease, attraction and threat, continuously coexist. As a pioneer in the reappraisal of ceramics within contemporary art, he has created a visual language in which human, animal, and organic forms often merge.

For Le Jardin des Simples, Creten drew inspiration from the traditional woven beehives that appear in historical imagery, including the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The faces emerging from the hives give these functional objects an unexpected human presence. In La Cathédrale, the honeycomb becomes more than a natural pattern. Inspired by The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck, Creten uses the beehive as a metaphor for human communities: places of cooperation, protection, and creativity, but also of hierarchy and power. Together, both works connect the life of bees with fundamental questions about how we live together.