‘Cities like open-air museums – it sounds like an idealistic dream, but I am striving to realize this dream. Confronting a public surrounded by art every day. Art has a positive influence on people and their personal development: it broadens their horizons and renders them more tolerant towards differences in society.’
Arne Quinze was born in 1971 in Belgium and lives and works in Sint- Martens-Latem, Belgium and Shanghai, China. In the eighties he began working as a graffiti artist but he never finished an official art education. Quinze creates large and small sculptures, drawings, paintings, and large- scale installations. Smaller works, sketches, and drawings are the basis and research for his large installations. Recurring fundamentals in his oeuvre are the use of multiple types of wood, including salvaged wood, metal and bronze, coloured glass, electrical colours in fluorescent paint, and themes referring to social interaction, communication and urbanism. Since a while he’s doing research towards large-scale steel installations.
What drives Quinze is the belief in the possible realization of an idealistic society where all individuals communicate and interact, aiming to bring people together and push them into a vigorous dialogue. In his urban vision, communal activities flourish and social cohesion is the norm. His installations are built to provoke reaction and to intervene in the daily life of passersby confronted with his sculptures. His unconventional public installations have challenged perceptions in the city centers of Belgium (Cityscape, The Sequence), Germany (The Traveller), France (Camille, Rock Strangers), Lebanon (The Visitor), China (Red Beacon, Chaos Wind ), the USA (Uchronia, Timegate), Brazil (Matarazzo), among others.
In every culture Quinze comes across, he unravels physical processes, drawing inspiration for his oeuvre, and is fueled by overwhelming optimism. Every new creative breed captures his research and study on interaction, and urban movement expressing the continuously evolution of human beings and their surroundings. Besides building architectural sculptures, he creates complex art pieces and video installations inscribing his vision in society of how people see themselves and society. Works as Bidonvilles, Stilthouses, Chaos, My Home My House My Stilthouse and My Safe Garden have been shown on several exhibitions.
