The Practice
Cédric Van Parys is a Brussels (BE) and Rotterdam (NL) based artist with a background in architecture and research. Working across media and conceptual frameworks, his practice primarily explores the relationship between natural and man-made monuments, infrastructures, sacred spaces, symbols, rituals, and aesthetics. By reinterpreting and reappropriating these phenomena, Van Parys questions traditional ideas of nationalism, cultural identity, collectivity, and environmentalism.
As a passionate explorer and attentive observer of cities and landscapes, Van Parys is often on the road, collecting various phenomena as individual elements, relating them to one another, and reassembling them in new ways. This content is transformed into monumental sculptural works, site-specific installations, and photographic assemblages—always balancing history and progress, elegance and boldness, the natural and the artificial, and the old and the new. This technique combines his academic background with an urgency for travel and adventure and a love for crafting raw matter. That is why he operates in different creative fields, from artist residencies in Shanghai and Sofia to collaborations with galleries, museums, municipalities, and institutions such as the recently concluded Garofalo Fellowship at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Drawing inspiration from diverse cultural contexts, history, archival research, and natural science, Van Parys aims to foster curiosity about the world we have made and inhabit and how this relates to the planet, the cosmos, and beyond.