AT A GLANCE
Why go?
On the beach of Ostend, a large empty steel frame stands facing the North Sea. It is Altar by Belgian conceptual artist Kris Martin, and it is shaped exactly like the frame of the famous Ghent Altarpiece painted by the Van Eyck brothers in 1432. Inside its open panels there is no painted scene—only the ever-shifting sea, sky, and light. The work asks you to look through it as if the ocean itself were a masterpiece in perpetual change.↗↗
Martin conceived Altar in 2014 at the request of the legendary curator Jan Hoet for his final exhibition, De Zee (The Sea), a citywide show in Ostend that stretched across Mu.ZEE museum and beaches alike. Hoet, founder of Ghent's S.M.A.K. and curator of Documenta IX, died before the opening; the exhibition was completed as a tribute. Altar became Martin's tribute within a tribute—honouring Hoet's lifelong passion for the Ghent Altarpiece by transplanting its silhouette onto the Flemish shore.↗↗
A Window on the Sea
Stand close to the frame and the view through it feels intimate—a sliver of sand, a stretch of grey-green water. Step back and the whole polyptych opens up: multiple panels, each catching a different slice of horizon. Martin calls this a tableau vivant, an ever-changing composition where colours shift with the weather and the season. "The sea is always different: wild and unpredictable," he says. The frame gives structure to that wildness without pinning it down.
