Cast Shadow

Artist Tim Onderbeke considers the publication Cast Shadow not as a collection of works, but as a work in itself. The book shows a selection of images from the artist’s archive, transformed into rasterized black-and-white photos with use of Digital Image Processing (re-photographing, printing, scanning). By playing with the porosity of the grid, the images generate a pictorial quality that may remind one of Warhol’s obscure screenprints. The mechanical printing-process is applied as a method of painting. 

The images, all made between 2001 and 2020, depict sculptures and pieces of furniture that have seized to exist as physical objects, and only remain as two-dimensional imprints. These representations are combined with photos of situations, landscapes and places that the artist has visited. They exist as shadows of a memory. By carefully curating these images, Onderbeke subtly references the psychoanalytic work The Shadow of the Object, in which author and philosopher Chistopher Bollas complemented Freud’s theory of the subconscious. Bollas describes how artists are strongly influenced by their immediate context (origin, childhood, life-course, etc.) and how this context affects their artistic practice.

In Cast Shadow, 248 reproductions of memories are made tangible through the medium of a book. The book as an exhibition. The exhibition as a book.