Agnès Van Ransbeeck
Sublime, but that’s only half the story
Agnès Van Ransbeeck is not an artist who systematically explores forms and structures with steely determination. Formalism is not for her. She sees it as essential to make reference to life in the world outside art itself. Artworks must have meaning. Precisely because they appear in (and presumably will one day disappear from) a world. For Van Ransbeeck, the way in which she plays with the materials is also rooted in her reflective contact with the art of others. Her own art sets out above all to create a dialogue, not to amaze.
Perhaps the activities of Agnès Van Ransbeeck are situated on the wafer-thin interface between intellectual uncertainty and passionate desire. This is what makes her work simultaneously simple and enigmatic, geometrical and whimsical, and poetic.
Frans Boenders
Kunst en Cultuur.
Nature...
Nature is a relevant topic in the bronze images of Agnès Van Ransbeeck. She approaches it not by way of a nostalgic reflex action, but from the perspective of its internal forces. A tree house represents a bridge between man and nature, but also makes reference to the inner spiritual landscape. It is a place of meditation, of stillness, but also of revolt and counterflow. In opposition to the icons of modernity (car and aeroplane), she goes ‘on a journey, by autumn leaf’.
Van Ransbeeck’s images exert fascination not only because of their profundity but also and above all as a result of their subtlety and communicative power. And the same is true of her bas-reliefs, in which she uses pictures, photos, flecks of colour and other subtle formal interventions to establish a unique identity.
Gerd Segers
Revolver.
Agnès Van Ransbeeck oscillates between cool and fragile.
In her bas-reliefs we experience three examples of her virtuoso control of her materials: the subtlety and fragility of the jewellery designer, the emotional nature of the caster in bronze, and the aspiration towards the eternal calm and inviolability of the sculptor in marble.
An encounter that she brings to us first with reason, then with feeling, first as a woman, then as an artist.
Jo Cobbaut
Het Volk.
A tree house.
A tree house, not a big one for you to live in, but a small one for you to look at, as a sculpture for example. Agnès Van Ransbeeck once made a series of tree houses, tree houses as artworks. Artworks that are part of the story of her artistry. The language of her communication is bronze. A woman who creates art in her magnificent house in the midst of nature. Art inspired by great emotion. Or more simply, art inspired by a little branch.
Griet Beaten
Isel Magazine.