In his work, Frank Halmans (1963) often explores the domestic world and considers a home as a place where life oscillates between a public and a private sphere. Halmans delves into how we, as humans, inhabit these two distinct areas. One could call the artist a “house expert”: he is a skilled carpenter, plumber, and mason, and therefore knows everything about houses. Yet, within his work, houses or parts thereof take on a dreamlike form. In this respect, his series of “architectural vacuum cleaners” depicts his vision well. For this series, the artist transformed several vacuum cleaners into small architectural households with separate rooms, emphasizing their individual characters. He turned the machines, which we usually use to keep our households clean, into individual and standalone objects. The dirt is now efficiently sucked up and can be seen as a metaphor for everything we collectively gather in both our memories and their physical manifestation as objects in our homes.
www.ftn-books.com has several Halmans pubications available.
