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Belgian artist Frank Maieu

Maieu Frank

Frank Maieu is a Belgian artist born in 1952. He is enrolled in plastic arts at the Rijksnormaalschool in Ghent where he is taught by Octave Landuyt, among others. Starting from a deep sense of the fantastic and surrealistic, drawing on a boundless imagination and with the necessary sense of irony and self-relativity, Frank Maieu constructs works that stand out for their unusual sense of construction and composition. Maieu's work can be thematically divided into series. Beyond the boundaries of these series, it can be said that Maieu has a very general humanistic concern, to summarize in the question: "What does man do to man"? From a painter's point of view, he sometimes uses a very realistic line of lines and then a looser, more expressionist style, sometimes approaching the limit of caricature. The paintings are supplemented by mini sculptures in ceramics in combination with other materials such as iron, wood and stone. Frank Maieu’s extensive oeuvre is made up of different series in which he works on the same theme or technique. Paintings and works on paper play the most important part in this. Recently, however, he found the visual pleasure in working with terracotta. Frank Maieu's work is socially critical, fights against capitalism, the extreme right and all sorts of abuse of power, and kicks the shins of the cultural establishment. It is steeped in irony and sarcasm, and is often macabre and sexually charged. Maieu's style evolved from a realism with clear influences of surrealism and Dadaism to a more expressionist style, similar to that of the New savages. In his ceramic figurines, he takes up themes and figurative elements from his paintings, but the tone is less cassant. He combines the sober clay figures with found, often decayed, objects into funny scenes with a critical underto (wikipedia)