From 2013 onwards, alongside the houses, Nele Tas became increasingly interested in fences, demarcations, and in particular, hedges. One’s own happiness. The green, artificial-looking hedges became detached within empty landscapes. Isolated in a barren panorama, the hedge loses its function as a ‘doorkeeper’. It becomes, so to speak, the negative of a house – a house that, until recently, it still ‘prettified’ and whose territory it demarcated. The hedge now functions as a cultivated, autonomous sculpture in a bare landscape.

In this series, the emphasis is on formal research and the dialogue between the trimmed hedges’ artificiality and their ‘natural’ surroundings. These small works served as pure research material – a ‘vocabulary’ of hedge forms – until the painter decided to enlarge one of the studies for a showcase window.

1          Hedge, 2013, oil paint on canvas,  69 x 25 cm
2        Bushes (two hearts), 2022, oil paint on canvas, 45 x 19 cm, photo by We Document Art
3                              Hedge, limp, 2018, oil paint on canvas, 68 x 30 cm
 4  Bush (closeby), 2017, oil paint on canvas, 59 x 24 cm
 5                                 Hedge (at rest), 2017, Oil paint on canvas, 33 x 74 cm
 6                   Small Hedge, 2014, oil paint on canvas, 55 x 22 cm
 7                 Two hedges (greedy, second version), 2017, oil paint on canvas, 70 x 18 cm
 8                   Bush (transparant), 2017, oil paint on canvas, 43 x 21  cm
 9          Hedge (birds), 2014, oil paint on canvas, 21 x 57 cm
           10               Two bushes (look through), 2016, oil paint on canvas, 74 x 33 cm
Photos by Tomas Uyttendaele