Sam Dendooven – °1976 Knokke-Heist

Lives and works in Aspelare-Belgium. 

Sam Dendooven is a Belgian self-taught artist. He studied industrial engineering construction and he feels like a real scientist and that’s how he approaches the world, and it is how he works.

As a child he went clay mining in the Zwingeul to shape his first sculptures. Several years later he made his own raku kiln to bake his first clay sculptures. He has not stopped experimenting since then.

The starting point of his sculptures is often empiricism that is triggered by amazement.The amazement about nature and natural processes, concepts, simple things of life that surround us, …

But he also works from the perspective of theory building. Those theories are fed in various ways: by observations and by the endless stream of thoughts that sprout from his associative brain.

After all, an important way for him to understand the world is to make observations that continue to develop this inner theory.He analyzes, structures and organizes these observations until larger patterns emerge.And those large patterns then form the basis for his internally consistent theory.

The interaction between that empiricism and theorizing is an iterative process that goes deeper and deeper and culminates in a new beginning.

He is currently working on a series ‘Architecture for the Soul’. It is a synthesis of all the observations, experiments and theories he has done so far. This experiment balances on the interface of architecture and sculpture and was translated in a minimalistic way.