Paul Van Hoeydonck 

On 8 October 2025, Antwerp-born Paul Van Hoeydonck would have celebrated his 100th birthday. The KMSKA will be paying a month-long tribute to the maker of the first artwork …  on the moon. Comprising 30-plus works, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s early years. The star attraction is the installation of the tiny, eight-centimetre Fallen Astronaut by the team of the 1971 Apollo 15 mission.

Paul Van Hoeydonck showed early signs of being an artistic techie, already when his work was first exhibited at Galerie Buyle in Antwerp in 1952. Yes, he presented conventional subjects such as still lifes, impressions of travels in Morocco and neo-expressionist-inspired circus figures, but his industrial landscapes, tall cranes and large port refineries show that his real interest as a painter lay in the new world of modernity. 

However, even that was not enough to satisfy Van Hoeydonck’s temperament, and two years later he turned his attention to geometric abstraction, animating the different forms in his compositions and collages with a lively energy. In 1956, he joined the Formes group, which was looking to give new impetus to abstraction. He went on to found the Antwerp G58 together with Jef Verheyen and others. 

The space race around that time prompted him to ask: ‘How is it possible that in 1958, in the age of Explorer, Sputniks and Juno III, people are unable to progress beyond abstract expressionism?’ Away from the strict conventions of constructed art, Van Hoeydonck found an answer in kinetic works, in which he actively involved the visitor. Lightworks/Lichtwerken, white monochromes giving the effect of light vibrations, and experiments with plexiglass replaced his paintings. Around 1960, critics described Van Hoeydonck as Belgium’s pre-eminent artist, who pushed the boundaries of painting.     

His passion for experimentation did not stop there, however. In the catalogue accompanying the Monochrome Malerei exhibition in Leverkusen (1960), Van Hoeydonck says: ‘We have begun a major revision… The earth will be the starting point, the new universe is the vastness of space.’ He assembled cybernetic creatures, ‘mutants’ and ‘bonshommes’ (‘good fellows’) made out of a range of utility objects in different materials. The KMSKA purchased one of these sculptures from Van Hoeydonck himself, the 1968 Spaceman, which is undergoing a refresh for the exhibition. Even before the first space missions with disastrous consequences, he made The Accident of Space (1964) and Cycle de la vie d’Icare (1966). These dramatic works show astronauts in their state-of-the-art, but now battered spacesuits.

Between 1955 and 1965, Paul Van Hoeydonck was at the epicentre of artistic developments in Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Venice, Milan, Düsseldorf and New York. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired work by Van Hoeydonck via the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris and this proved a crucial step in the development and reception of his art. Ten years later, that American connection led to a collaboration with NASA. In August 1971, the Apollo 15 mission left his Fallen Astronaut on the surface of the moon as a tribute to deceased astronauts and cosmonauts. 

Throughout his artistic odyssey, Paul Van Hoeydonck challenged the status quo of art. As an archaeologist by training, he sketched the broad outlines of the future of humanity. Now that fully-automated commercial space travel is becoming a reality, the recently deceased artist validates his vision.