Berend Strik @ Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels - "Threads that Echo" Exhibition - Text by Marja Bloem

Berend Strik 

Threads that Echo

Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels

4 September - 25 October 2025

Berend Strik gave this rather enigmatic title to his first exhibition at the Hopstreet Gallery, but looking at his work, the meaning becomes clear.

Upon entering the first room, visitors are immediately struck by a large, colourful piece. A Pollock? No, a Strik! In this uninvited collaboration with Pollock, Strik explains his relationship with art history, with the ‘great’ masters – his icons.

The work is composed of photographic images that have been enhanced with textile techniques including threads, appliqués and different types of stitches. This fusion of photography and textiles is a rare combination.  For Strik, who also creates drawings, ceramics and theatre, the choice of photography was based on one of its essential characteristics. “A photograph shows an image of something that once existed, but is no longer physically visible. It does not exist, yet it can be seen in a photographic image. Memories, references, descriptions, suggestions and spatial indications are all part of it.” And the textile work opens that space up. The Pollock piece is part of an ongoing project Strik has been working on for several years, entitled Deciphering the Artist’s Mind, in which he seeks to position himself in relation to art history and reflect on his role as an artist within society.

The Dutch artist Karel Appel, also one of Strik’s icons, is also featured in Deciphering the Artist’s Mind. Appel became notorious for saying “I just mess around a bit.” In reality, Strik discovered, Appel allowed the unconscious to surface, but he knew exactly what he was doing. It is precisely this kind of hidden meaning that Strik seeks to uncover or highlight. To that end, he chose to cover certain areas with velvet (what is being concealed?) and to add all manner of stitches, holes, and fabric fragments. He didn’t work on a photograph of a work by Appel but on a photo of a work that no longer exists because Appel himself painted over it. The original work was concealed under layers of paint, but was revealed through infrared light.

Strik deliberately avoids the word embroidery as he feels it steers the viewer’s thoughts in a particular direction, which is precisely what he wishes to prevent. He wants the viewer to bring their own context to the work, and in doing so, reach something more universal. For Strik, the artist’s studio is above all the place of genesis; the place where a work comes into being.

The series about mothers, presented in another room, also relates to the idea of origin. By concealing some elements and accentuating others, these works exude a subtle, intimate atmosphere that is universally recognisable. Strik aims to evoke a sense of shared memories, a feeling like ‘oh yes, my mother…’ and ‘we all have a mother’.

In Strik’s work, we can see very clearly how it was made; unlike, say, a painting where one can only guess at the suggestions. We can literally see the stitches, how a shape has been cut from fabric and sewn on, how the stitching varies from rough to precise. Sewing is an ancient technique; it’s instantly recognisable to the brain. Human brains are equipped with mirror neurons that associate results with movements: splatters with a mess, a cut with a knife. Sewing is one of those gestures, deeply rooted in our cognitive process, going back to the beginnings of humanity and the earliest human societies. The combination of these two elements, photography and sewing, has a unique effect on the brain. On the one hand, there is the photograph, which feels deeply personal precisely because of its universality. The image is then pierced by the familiar gestures of sewing. In our minds, these elements do not naturally belong together. It’s precisely this sense of the unexpected that compels the viewer to keep searching for meaning.  Strik’s art is an active event: a process of manipulation, transformation, and reinterpretation of images and materials. It plays with revelation and concealment, with the human desire to understand, and the necessity of leaving space for the unknown. Altering photographs with a needle and textiles is a form of dissection and reconstruction.

“As a photographer I capture,” Strik explains, “and as an editor of the image, I liberate it. Only then does the photograph gain value as an autonomous entity with presence in the here and now.”

Marja Bloem, Director of the Egress Foundation

Artist Berend Strik

Berend Strik (born 26 April 1960, Nijmegen) is a Dutch visual artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 1985 to 1988. Between 1998 and 2000, he participated in the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

Strik’s work is held in various public collections in The Netherlands, including the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; Kunstmuseum, The Hague; Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Schunck Museum, Heerlen; TextielMuseum, Tilburg; and Museum De Domijnen, Sittard.

His work is also represented in numerous corporate collections, such as Stichting Kunst & Historisch Bezit; ABN AMRO; Achmea Art Collection; AkzoNobel Art Foundation; AMC Art Collection; Bouwfonds Kunstcollectie; Kunstcollectie De Nederlandsche Bank; LUMC Art Collection; Ahold Collection; BPD Art Collection; and the Rabo Art Collection.

His work is currently on display in the group exhibition ‘Things I’ve Never Seen Before’ at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It is a selection from the donation made by gallery owner and collector Fons Welters, who donated a series of exceptional works to the museum in 2022. The exhibition runs until 19 October 2025.

HOPSTREET GALLERY BRUSSELS

Sint-Jorisstraat 109 rue Saint Georges, 1050 Brussels 

www.hopstreet.be

Cecilia Vicuna @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Arch Future" Exhibition + Online Exhibition "Cecilia Vicuña: Selected Video Works"

Cecilia Vicuña: Arch Future

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

5 June — 2 August 2025

“I focus on native ‘writing’ and ‘non-writing’ systems of my Andean universe, to bring their creative potential back into the world, addressing the untreated grief of colonisation.”

— Cecilia Vicuña

Arch Future (archaic future) marks the debut exhibition of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña with the gallery. Spanning over sixty years, the show brings together every element of her expansive interdisciplinary practice, including three site-specific installations — two monumental quipus and a room-size precario installation ­— alongside drawings, paintings, poetry, archival materials, sound, and film. Included are some of what the artist refers to as “Lost Paintings,” recent recreations of paintings from the 1960s and 70s that were lost or destroyed following the Chilean military coup. The exhibition also marks the European premiere of her recent film poem, Death of the Pollinators (2021). The title Arch Future reflects Vicuña’s sustained engagement with indigenous knowledge systems and local ecosystems as visionary, alternative forms of architecture ­— tools for imagining a more sustainable and just future.

The exhibition opens with Quipu Menstrual (2006-2024), a dense, sculptural installation of unspun wool in vivid shades of red and brown that is suspended from the ceiling. For over fifty years, Cecilia Vicuña has been creating quipus ­— striking embodiments of an ancestral, non-alphabetic communication system rooted in Andean culture. Traditionally used in pre-Columbian civilisations as three-dimensional records, quipus encoded knowledge and transmitted messages ­— perhaps even stories ­— through intricate systems of colour, knotting, and placement. Vicuña reclaims and reactivates this ancient language as a living symbol of memory, resistance, and embodied wisdom.

Vicuña’s quipus often emerge as poetic responses to ecological, social, or political urgencies. They are never static but evolve in dialogue with each site and community, absorbing its energy and context. Quipu Menstrual grew out of The Blood of Glaciers / La sangre de los glaciares, a performance on Chile’s El Plomo Glacier (2006), where Vicuña first drew a symbolic parallel between menstrual blood and melting ice ­— both vital, cyclical, and under threat. This poetic gesture underscores the fragility of ecosystems as well as the life-giving power of the feminine.

Installed nearby in the double-height gallery is the white monochromatic quipu Forest Son (2025), a site-specific “child” continuation of her celebrated Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern, Brain Forest Quipu (2022). Composed of unspun wool, rope, cardboard, plant fibres, and found materials, this work resonates with symbolic meaning. Here, the quipu becomes a mournful elegy for environmental destruction and the ongoing violence against Indigenous communities. At once lament and portal for alternative forms of knowledge, it invites reflection on our shared responsibility ­— and illustrates ways of interconnected knowledge.

Death of the Pollinators (2021) is a powerful meditation on ecological collapse and interdependence. Created with the participation of Colombian musician Ricardo Gallo and American filmmaker Robert Kolodny, the work combines Vicuña’s poetry and chant with immersive visual and sonic textures to address the alarming global decline of bees (in the European Union alone, an estimated 78% of wildflowers and 84% of crop plants depend on pollinators for their survival — yet many of these vital species are now on the brink of extinction). The film seamlessly transitions from bees navigating clouds of pollen, symbolising their vital importance, to the visually stunning and glittering appearance of honey, evoking a sense of celestial beauty and abundance. Its finale, bathed in red, alludes to climate warming decimating bees and the devastating fires erupting in the hottest parts of the world. Sound is central to the work’s impact: referencing sonification ­— the process by which certain bees release pollen through vibration ­— Cecilia Vicuña draws a parallel between natural resonance and collective awakening.

Downstairs, Cecilia Vicuña debuts a new large-scale precario installation, entitled Ciudad Geométrica (2025). The installation fills the gallery with quiet intensity, forming a sort of minimalist and precarious “geometric city.” Composed of ephemeral materials such as driftwood, feathers, shells, bones, stones, and scraps of fabric, the installation brings together elements collected in Belgium, Chile, and New York. Here, Vicuña responds directly to the space’s architectural geometry with assemblages that form a poem in space. Trained in architecture before turning to art, Cecilia Vicuña also alludes to the sculptural dimension of stonework in Andean pre-Columbian architecture. Her precarios challenge conventional ideas of art, particularly sculpture, as immutable and eternal, offering instead a poetic counterpoint to the exploitative practices of colonisation and capitalism. These works speak to cycles of disappearance and resurgence, fragility and endurance. As Cecilia Vicuña notes, they offer a way to “see the unseen,” illuminating the interconnectedness of all life.

The upper galleries are dedicated to Vicuña’s paintings, including a selection of new versions of her abstract works, Pinturas Solares (Solar Paintings) that she originally made in Chile between 1965 and 1967, when she was aged seventeen to nineteen. In 1972, she moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, but following the 1973 military coup that violently ended the government of Salvador Allende, she was forced into exile, leaving behind her earliest paintings, which were eventually destroyed or lost. For Arch Future, she has repainted some of them, reconnecting with the origins of her long and multifaceted practice. Although widely recognised today for her quipus and precarios, Cecilia Vicuña often emphasises that she began as a poet and a painter. Her early canvases reflect an intuitive engagement with shamanic ritual ­— brujo meaning “shaman” ­— and the “soft geometry” inherent in Andean visual languages. These compositions are infused with references to Nasca textiles, pre-Columbian iconography, fungi, and myths surrounding altered states of consciousness, linking the ancestral with the visionary in a continuum of cultural memory.

Vicuña’s sound piece, Honguito niño (Fungi child), created in collaboration with Giuliana Furci and Cosmo Sheldrake, focuses on the rediscovery of the Psilocybe stametsii. This rare and elusive mushroom, first documented by Dr. Brian Dentinger in 2011, was seen again in the cloud forests of Ecuador by mycologist Giuliana Furci, a friend of the artist. Known for its tiny, solitary form ­— no taller than a matchstick ­— it has only been observed twice, each time as a single, inconspicuous specimen blending into the decaying leaf litter. Though part of the diverse Psilocybe genus, its singular presence has captured imaginations across disciplines. Like bees, fungi are essential to the Earth’s ecosystems, playing a crucial role in nutrient cycling, symbiotic relationships, and forest regeneration. Yet they too face existential threats from climate change, deforestation, and pesticides. This enigmatic sound work brings together ancestral sound techniques and layered voices ­— including those of fungi conservationists ­— to create an immersive, otherworldly composition. The piece is both elegy and incantation, channelling the silent resilience of the forest and its hidden life, in dialogue with the painting inspired by the mushroom’s reappearance in the dark undergrowth ­— a symbol of quiet survival and the possibility of rebirth after devastation.

As an extension of Arch Future, Cecilia Vicuña presents a curated selection of her video works in an online exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: Selected Video Works on view until 23 August. The films selected for the exhibition range from some of her earliest works from the 1980s to more recent productions, spanning formats including animation and documentary.

CECILIA VICUNA (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile) lives and works between Santiago and New York. She received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, Italy in 2022. In 2023-2024, a major travelling retrospective has been jointly organised by Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), Santiago; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA); and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Other recent solo exhibitions include: MOCA, Tucson (2023); Tate Modern, London (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022); Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Bogotá (2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid (2021); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC Mexico City (2020); and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2020), among others.

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels 

www.xavierhufkens.com

Nathanaëlle Herbelin @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "And there is a place you will not be able to return to" Exhibition

Nathanaëlle Herbelin

And there is a place you will not be able to return to

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Through 21 June 2025

Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s exhibition at Xavier Hufkens (the second at the gallery) presents a new series of portraits and interiors that navigate the fragile balance between immediate, everyday experience and the weight of an unsettled world. At once intimate and expansive, these paintings reflect a desire to hold on to moments of connection―small yet significant interactions with friends, neighbours, and family―amidst an undercurrent of grief, uncertainty, and shifting realities. Herbelin’s approach is neither sentimental nor detached; rather, she paints with an acute awareness of how personal and collective histories intertwine. The act of painting becomes a way to ground herself, to acknowledge absence, and to bear witness to both quiet rituals and emotional thresholds.

While Herbelin’s earlier works were characterised by vibrant colours and clearly defined settings, the paintings in this exhibition embrace ambiguity. Figures emerge from undefined or weighty backgrounds, emphasising presence over place, memory over setting. Arie, the artist’s late grandfather from Israel, is painted posthumously from photographs. His depiction resists traditional hierarchies of representation—someone who might not typically be immortalised on canvas is here granted a quiet yet steadfast visibility. Herbelin’s gaze is both tender and unflinchingly honest, stripping away embellishment to reveal the raw intimacy of her subjects.

The absent presence of Herbelin’s late grandfather can also be felt in two of Herbelin’s works depicting Jewish mourning rituals. In Shiva, Nathanaëlle Herbelin reconstructs, from memory, a bird’s-eye view of her grandfather’s home during shiva, the seven-day mourning period following a funeral. The painting reflects the charged atmosphere of this ritual, in which the bereaved remain at home, marking their loss through time-honoured rituals: sitting on low chairs, covering mirrors, and lighting a candle in remembrance. The second, larger work on this theme, Dîner aux œufs durs [Dinner with Hard-Boiled Eggs], interprets the Se’udat Havra’ah, the meal of condolence that follows a burial. Hard-boiled eggs―along with bagels, lentils and other round foods―are central to this meal, symbolising the cycle of life and renewal. The composition of the painting takes inspiration from Egon Schiele’s Die Freunde (Tafelrunde), groß [The Friends (Round Table), Large], 1918. Just as Schiele painted his own circle of friends gathered around the table, Nathanaëlle Herbelin populates Dîner aux œufs durs with her own acquaintances as well as imagined figures.

While portraits remain central to Herbelin’s practice, her nuanced depictions of interior spaces are equally poignant in conveying mood and atmosphere, revealing the psychological depths of her subjects. Two interior scenes, in particular, evoke contrasting realities and psychological spaces: one depicting a desolate kitchen, Ustensiles, and the other, Jérémie qui donne le biberon, portraying the artist’s partner, Jérémie, feeding their baby in a hotel room in China where the artist recently completed a residency. The panoramic view framed by the window in the latter painting contrasts starkly with the small, barely visible window in the kitchen, a subtle indicator of confinement and diminished hope. Similarly, the personal possessions on the hotel table stand in contrast to their near-total absence in the kitchen, despite other clues suggesting a recent human presence. The latter painting holds the quiet act of care in tension with the busy, impersonal cityscape beyond, reflecting the contrast between private tenderness and the vastness of the outside world.

The interplay between interior and exterior spaces―both literal and psychological―in this new body of work mirrors the artist’s negotiation of past and present, presence and absence. Whether reconstructing her grandfather’s apartment from memory, capturing the transient intimacy of a shared meal, or painting figures from her neighbourhood, Herbelin’s works resist easy narratives. Instead, her paintings offer a space where the everyday and the existential coexist, where the act of looking itself becomes an act of recognition.

The exhibition title comes from the poem Eyes Sadness and Journey Descriptions (עצבות עיניים ותיאורי מסע), from the book Behind All This, Hides Great Happiness (מאחורי כל זה מסתתר אושר גדול) by Yehuda Amichai.

NATHANAELLE HERBELIN (b. 1989, Tel Aviv, Israel) obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, during which time she was invited to participate in an exchange programme at The Cooper Union, New York. Herbelin’s first solo exhibition in Asia, Feel the pulse, opened at the He Art Museum in Shunde, China (8 March to 8 June 2025). It  showcases the works made during her residency at the museum in 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include Être ici est une splendeur, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2024); À la surface, le fond de l’oeil, French Institute of Tel Aviv (2022); Et peut-être que ces choses n’ont jamais eu lieu, Umm Al Fahem Palestinian Art Center (2021), Devenire Peinture, Yishu 8 prize, George V Art Centre, Beijing (2021); and group exhibitions such as the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2021); Passerelle Art Center, Brest (2020); the museums of the Abbaye Sainte-Croix (Sables d’Olonnes, 2019); Bétonsalon, Paris (2019); the Beaux-Arts Museum of Rennes (2018), Collection Lambert, Avignon (2017) and Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017).

XAVIER HUFKENS

44 rue Van Eyck, Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Nathanaëlle Herbelin: And there is a place you will not be able to return to

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 23 April — 21 June 2025

McArthur Binion @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Rawness Dancing:With Intellect" Exhibition Curated by Anne Pontégnie

McArthur Binion

Rawness Dancing:With Intellect

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

16 January — ​8 March 2025

Rawness Dancing:With Intellect is an exhibition dedicated to the pioneering work of American artist McArthur Binion (b. 1946, Mississippi). Curated by Anne Pontégnie, it showcases the development of Binion’s work over the course of the last 15 years. Different series are brought together for the first time, divided into three themes across three floors. Highlights include a rare early work from 1985, together with a series of DNA works, the never previously exhibited Haints series (2014) and a group of six new Visual:Ear paintings (2023-24). McArthur Binion’s work blends elements of minimalism and conceptualism with autobiographical and cultural narratives, resulting in paintings and drawings that are both visually compelling and emotionally resonant. Over the years, his art has evolved through changes in technique, theme, and the exploration of personal and historical memory. The title alludes to the harmony between emotional and physical labour, as described by the artist: “my intellect and rawness are dancing together”.

The exhibition opens with McArthur Binion’s latest paintings in the Visual:Ear series, a tribute to Jazz records of particular significance to the artist. The series comprises of 12 paintings in total, half of which are exhibited here for the first time. The first room includes, for example, Visual: Ear (Maestro Duke), a tribute to Duke Ellington, and Visual:Ear (Unit Structures), honouring Cecil Taylor’s album. They are bordered with photographs of the musicians repeated alongside the edges of the paintings, a framing device reminiscent of quilts. The Visual:Ear paintings are a continuation of Binion’s exploration of music and visual abstraction, dating back to his time at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. It was here that he created Drawn Symphony:in:Sane Minor, a hand-drawn piece on musical manuscript paper, in 1971. McArthur Binion introduced the ‘visual ear’ concept in his 1973 graduation thesis, which represents his first attempt to visualise music. The current Visual: Ear series began in 2021, with each painting built on a collaged base of musical scores. He calls this layer, which varies from series to series, the ‘underconscious’. Using oil sticks, Binion creates dense, repetitive markings that form geometric patterns and grids, partially hiding the initial imagery. This interplay of concealment and revelation invites viewers to explore the music-inspired and personal narratives within the artwork. Born in Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues, Binion was immersed in a cultural milieu that valued rhythm, improvisation and storytelling – qualities that still reverberate through his work. Within the gridded compositions, he combines methodical, dynamic structures with layering techniques, similar to the rhythms and improvisation of blues and jazz. McArthur Binion uses music as a source of creativity and a way of analysing the structure and emotions in his work. The lighter variants of the series are displayed on the floor below.

The Haints series (2014) in the adjacent rooms consists of ten works that explore the artist’s Mississippi roots and Southern upbringing. Haint is an alternate spelling of ‘haunt’, a term used by African-Americans to describe ghosts or restless spirits. McArthur Binion elaborates: “They involve reverse maps of Mississippi, and are an extension of the DNA:Studies. They are larger self-portraits about who I am and how I live – all the information is there. These works are specifically about me. They are about my involvement with haints and Mississippi... Haints are about people that you knew that are dead – so the ghosts are real. It’s really emotional with the work.” In a break with his typical practice, the Haints are devoid of an underconscious. He continues: “I associate the haints with the legend of people down South crawling out of their skin; I’ve been looking for haints all of my life. The haints swirl around all of the maltreatment that has happened in Mississippi for centuries and centuries – the lynchings, the rape, the regular straight up murders, etc. My father worked seven days a week and made $7.32 per week. So I know what haints are.”

A selection of the artist’s DNA:Studies are shown on the first floor, alongside smaller format works from both the Hand:Work and Visual:Ear series. Colour, autobiography and technique are key focal points in this display. Binion’s DNA:Studies, a subset of the broader DNA series, is a cornerstone of his practice. Central to this body of work is Binion’s replication of his old address and telephone book as the underconscious, a uniquely private artefact that encapsulates years of relationships, connections and memories. With its handwritten entries and worn pages, the book is a literal and symbolic repository of his life experiences. He says: “Each day for the months I painted those, I relived every day of my life because of all of those names.” The names and numbers, partially obscured by layers of oil stick or crayon, are visible upon close examination, adding a narrative layer to the otherwise austere, minimalist grids. The repetitive mark-making, a hallmark of Binion’s practice, recalls the meditative labour of memory and identity formation. It also evokes the physicality and discipline of his early life, spent working on a farm in rural Mississippi.

This contemplative yet physically demanding process also transforms the grid into a tangible record of the artist’s presence. His gestures both conceal and reveal, creating a dynamic tension that reflects the complexity of memory and identity. Binion’s works are thus defined by the proportions of his body, such as hand span and arm length, as well as his physical agility. In the series Hand:Work, Binion makes this connection explicit by incorporating images of his own hand into the underconscious. By foregrounding the physical nature of his practice, McArthur Binion challenges the impersonal, mechanical associations of abstraction and minimalism. His art becomes a testament to the interplay between the intellectual and the corporeal, the personal and the universal. Through this embodied approach, McArthur Binion transforms the act of making art into a profound exploration of what it means to inhabit a body and a history. He creates works that are as much about the process of becoming as they are about the final form.

McArthur Binion lives and works in Chicago. His works were featured prominently in the 57th Venice Biennale, VIVA ARTE VIVA. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organised at Peter Marino Art Foundation, Southampton, NY, USA (2024); Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy (2020); the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI (2018); the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX (2012). McArthur Binion’s work is in numerous public and private collections and his most recent venture is the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation that provides funding and workspaces to help young visual artists and writers of colour find their voices.

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

www.xavierhufkens.com

Joana Vasconcelos @ BRAFA 2025, Brussels - Guest of Honour

Joana Vasconcelos: Guest of Honour 

BRAFA 2025, Brussels 

January 26 – February 2, 2025

Joana Vasconcelos 

© Lionel Balteiro | LaMousse 

Courtesy Atelier Joana Vasconcelos

Joana Vasconcelos 

Dream Curtain, 2023 

© Andre Nacli 

Courtesy Museu Oscar Niemeyer

Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese visual artist, born in 1971. Over the course of her 30-year career, she has made use of a wide variety of media. Although she has a preference for textiles, Joana Vasconcelos also works with cement, metal, ceramics, glass, and found objects. She is renowned for her monumental sculptures and immersive installations. Her ambition is to decontextualise everyday objects and revisit the concept of craft in the twenty-first century. Her humorous, ironic work examines the status of women, consumer society and collective identity.

Her international reputation was consolidated in 2005, at the first Venice Biennale curated by women, where she presented her piece The Bride, a classically shaped chandelier whose crystal pendants had been replaced by approximately 14,000 tampons.

Joana Vasconcelos was the youngest artist and the first woman to exhibit at the Château de Versailles in 2012. In 2018, she became the first Portuguese artist to have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 2023, she had the honour of exhibiting at the Uffizi Galleries and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, alongside great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Caravaggio.

At BRAFA 2025, she will be exhibiting two Valkyries, sculptures inspired by the female figures from Norse mythology who flew over the battlefields, bringing the bravest warriors back to life to join the deities in Valhalla. Made from textiles, they give full expression to the artist’s creativity, involving a variety of fabrics and trimmings. The result is a surprising combination of volumes, textures and colours. Made up of a central body, a head, a tail and several arms, many of the Valkyries combine traditional craftsmanship with more technological methods, such as the insertion of light to simulate vibration and breathing, which gives movement to the work.

BRAFA Art Fair

Brussels Expo – Halls 3 & 4 – Place de Belgique 1, 1020 Brussels

www.brafa.art

KIK- IRPA – Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage @ BRAFA 2025, Brussels

KIK- IRPA – Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage 

BRAFA 2025, Brussels 

January 26 – February 2, 2025

© KIK-IRPA, Brussels

© KIK-IRPA, Brussels

Since its founding in 1948, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) has played a pioneering role in the preservation of a wide variety of heritage objects, including paintings, wood and stone sculptures, tapestries, precious metals, glass and elements of architectural heritage. The building in Brussels that has housed KIK-IRPA since 1962 was the first in the world to be specially designed to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to conserving works of art, in which restorers, chemists, engineers, imaging specialists, photographers and art historians work together. Approximately 100 of its scientists are working on ambitious projects at both national and international levels.

KIK-IRPA is best known for its prestigious restorations, such as that of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the Van Eyck brothers in the former baptistery of Ghent's Saint Bavo Cathedral. In its state-of-the-art laboratories, advanced tools such as 3D microscopy, macro-XRF, and radiocarbon dating provide crucial insights into the materials and techniques used by artists and craftsmen, helping to ensure the proper preservation of cultural treasures for future generations. Great importance is attached to rigorous documentation and art history research. For example, the Institute preserves Belgium’s collective visual memory in the BALaT online database, which contains over a million photographs of cultural objects, hundreds of thousands of which can be downloaded free of charge.

At BRAFA 2025, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage will be showcasing the many facets of its work, from art conservation and restoration to heritage management and scientific analysis, in a space next to the King Baudouin Foundation. Visitors are invited to discover how specialists analyse and document works of art, providing fascinating insights into their history and their crafting techniques. 

Workshops will be held every day at 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. for members of the public to learn about methods of conserving works of art and to explore the technologies that are currently in use. Experts will also share fascinating discoveries from their research, illustrating how scientific methods and modern technology are unlocking new dimensions for the understanding of historical works of art.

Workshops can only be booked via the

BRAFA website: www.brafa.art

From Sunday, January 26th to Sunday, February 2nd, 2025, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Brussels Expo – Halls 3 & 4 – Place de Belgique 1, 1020 Brussels

Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage – KIK- IRPA

www.kikirpa.be

BALaT online database

balat.kikirpa.be

Joan Semmel @ Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels — "An Other View" Exhibition — Her first solo show in Europe since the 1960s

Joan Semmel: An Other View 

Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels

25 April — 15 June 2024

Xavier Hufkens presents An Other View, American painter JOAN SEMMEL (b.1932)’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery. Her first solo show in Europe since the 1960s, the exhibition spans a period of five decades, showcasing the major developments in the artist’s oeuvre. The twelve large-format oil paintings on display, created between 1971 and 2021, collectively attest to Joan Semmel’s decades-long commitment to the representation of women, largely through the medium of her own body. The passage of time, permits the viewers to take an unvarnished look at natural ageing, as well as consider the socio-political engagement of ‘the personal is the political’ and the evolution of feminist issues across multiple decades, from the sexual liberation of the 70s to contemporary society’s veneration of youth.

By adopting a resolutely non-objectifying stance — her own body as the subject — Joan Semmel has created an oeuvre that not only challenges traditional representations of women but also explores themes such as identity, sexuality, and censorship. She does not consider her paintings to be self-portraits, but rather as touchstones: images that bring critical issues into focus, so that they can be confronted. While Joan Semmel tends to work in series, the element that binds the oeuvre together — in addition to the focus on selfhood and self-representation — is the use of colour. Semmel’s approach to colouration is abstract, whereas her approach to figuration is unapologetically realistic.

The earliest work in the exhibition is one of Joan Semmel’s iconic sex paintings from 1971. Painted in reaction to the commercial exploitation of female bodies, Joan Semmel sought to create an erotic visual language that would speak to women. Her belief that female repression begins in the sexual arena was another catalyst. Using the body as a structural form, and colours that betray her Abstract Expressionist roots, these pioneering works are intimate yet devoid of sentimentality. The contemporaneous Self-Image series, represented by two works on paper, mark a turning point in her practice: the beginning of the intense focus on her own body. A key aim was to challenge the male gaze in Western painting and popular culture. Hence her decision to become both observer and subject in her work, transcending the traditional themes of vulnerability and seduction. Crucially, she opted to paint her body from her own point of view, both in a literal and figurative sense. This is clear in a work like Weathered (2018): the viewer observes the female body from within the frame, so to speak, as if looking through the eyes of the artist.

Works such as Odalesque (1998), Baroque (2002) and Disappearing (2006) highlight three important devices in Joan Semmel’s work: mannequins, mirrors and cameras. Each object has a clear purpose. Odalesque is one of a series of works featuring discarded mannequins, which Joan Semmel found on the streets of New York. These paintings are a dark critique on consumer culture and, in her own words “the mass production of the desirable female image”. The lifeless forms allude to the cult of youth and how women can be ‘discarded’ once they reach a certain age. Mirrors and cameras, on the other hand, have an empowering function. Both are included in Baroque, alongside a mannequin. Joan Semmel points the camera at a mirror to take a self-portrait but, via the reflection, simultaneously trains it on the viewer. A tripling of the female body — real (the foot on the glass), artificial (mannequin) and illusory (reflection) — but also a reversal of the female gaze: through the camera, the viewer also becomes a subject of the work. A painting about looking and being looked at. The mirror alludes to the artificiality of images and the construction of identity, but also to art itself: paintings and photographs are illusions, never the reality. Disappearing, which is based on a photograph, is noteworthy for replicating the blur of the original image in pigments, thereby creating a sense of movement.

Joan Semmel’s work invites viewers to reconsider the ways in which women’s bodies are perceived and represented in art, in society, and in contemporary culture. Says the artist: “Reimagining the nude without objectifying the person, using my own body, made it clear that the artist was female and undercut the stereotypes of the male artist and the female muse. I wanted to subvert that tradition from within.”

JOAN SEMMEL (b. 1932, New York) lives and works in New York and East Hampton. She was recently the subject of a large-scale retrospective Skin in the Game that opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2021 and toured to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, in 2022. She presented A Lucid Eye at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in 2013. Public collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Tate, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others.

XAVIER HUFKENS GALLERY

44 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Sherrie Levine @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Sherrie Levine

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

15 February — 6 April 2024

American artist Sherrie Levine’s third exhibition with Xavier Hufkens gallery brings together new paintings and sculptures that reference some of the most seminal artists of the modern era. Vincent Van Gogh and Piet Mondrian are the inspiration behind Levine’s new oil paintings, in dialogue with Elk Skull (2024) – a spectacular polished bronze cast of an antlered skull.

Sherrie Levine has long appropriated well-known artworks to create her own unique oeuvre. By revisiting specific images from different technical and conceptual standpoints over the years, she has created interrelated bodies of work that speak to both the art historical canon and to each other. While these can be analysed from a theoretical standpoint, they are just as much a homage to the artists she admires. Levine has recently returned to the oeuvres of Van Gogh and Mondrian to produce two new series of paintings. In art historical terms, the Dutch masters could not be more different: Van Gogh, the expressionist, poetic painter of nature and Mondrian, the rational champion of geometric abstraction; one the proponent of an art that stood above nature, the other almost preternaturally attuned to the landscape. Yet in posthumous terms, they meet on common ground. Their paintings, which have an almost hallowed status, are crowd-pullers and reproduced on everything from postcards to T-shirts.

Sherrie Levine’s ten new monochromes are inspired by Van Gogh’s iris paintings. Five are single colour ‘averages’, which were created via digital analyses of the original colour palettes, and the others are inverse equivalents. Van Gogh completed the iris canvases in the last year of his life while a patient at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Now amongst his most celebrated works, he originally referred to them as ‘colour studies’. Levine distils each of Van Gogh’s vibrant paintings into a single tone. His multicoloured palette becomes monochrome, expressionism turns into abstract minimalism, emotion gives way to sobriety, variations are averaged, formats are standardised, and the hand of the artist vanishes. What is the relationship between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ works? Levine’s monochromes are a development of the Meltdown series that she commenced in 1989. In these earlier works, she digitally reduced the colour palettes of notable paintings to twelve pixels, turning each value into a woodblock print. This process has now reached a logical conclusion: instead of twelve coloured rectangles representing each work, there is now just one.

The After Piet Mondrian (2023-ongoing) paintings are based on a 1983 series of chromogenic photographs (c-prints) that Sherrie Levine made from book illustrations of the Dutch artist’s grid compositions. She is now painting the c-prints, thereby ‘rematerialising’ them, so to speak, and bringing her research full circle. The aim is to complete a coloured, inverse and a black and white painting of each of her photographs. Via the series, created four decades apart, Levine highlights and disrupts the links between original artwork, photograph, reproduction, and source (book). The distortion and misrepresentation of colour is as much of a concern today as it was in 1983, with Levine removing it entirely in the black-and-white painting. Yet one distortion leads to another, as she has also reformatted Mondrian’s works to fit identically sized mahogany panels.

The sculptures Elk Skull (2024) and Water Spirit (2012) are further examples of material transformation. Cast from found objects – one organic, the other manmade – they interrogate, like the paintings, the uneasy relationships between original and reproduction or, in the case of sculpture, replication. Elk Skull is not only the most recent work in her ongoing series of polished animal skull casts, but also the largest example that she has made in recent years. It alludes, in equal measure, to Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous skull paintings and to the iconography of the American Southwest. Sherrie Levine started making these casts after spending time in Santa Fe, where O’Keeffe lived and worked. But while the latter’s skull paintings explored the power of nature over the individual, Sherrie Levine’s polished bronze recalls the sculptures of two other male, modernist artists, Brancusi, and Arp. Water Spirit, a free-standing sculpture in patinated bronze, with its soft dark sheen, forms a tactile counterpoint to the gleaming wall-mounted skull and attests to the artist’s ongoing interest in materiality and crafts objects.

Sherrie Levine (b.1947) lives and works in New York. Her earliest work was included in the seminal exhibition Pictures (1977) at the Artists Space in New York. In 1981 Levine debuted her controversial series Untitled, After Walker Evans which, together with other similar series, made her a leading member of the ‘Pictures Generation’, a group of artists using appropriation techniques to challenge the notions of authenticity and originality in the media-saturated 1980s. Sherrie Levine's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide and can be found in major international museum collections.

XAVIER HUFKENS

44 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Leon Kossoff @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Close Encounters: Paintings and Drawings" Exhibition

Leon Kossoff

Close Encounters: Paintings and Drawings

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

2 February — 30 March 2024

Xavier Hufkens presents the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of the British painter LEON KOSSOFF (1926-2019). Featuring paintings and drawings made over a four-decade period,  the presentation highlights two significant bodies of work showcasing major themes in Leon Kossoff’s oeuvre, namely London cityscapes and his ‘translations’ of works by Old and Modern Masters. The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Leon Kossoff’s practice as well as its stylistic evolution.

Leon Kossoff was a leading member of the London School, a loose association of artists that also included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and David Hockney. Although stylistically diverse, they all focused on figuration and expressive realism at a time when abstraction and minimalism were the dominant forces in contemporary art. Kossoff painted London almost obsessively. The works in the exhibition include scenes from the north of the city, where he lived and worked, and the East End, where he was raised. Painted between 1971 and 1992, they chronicle Kossoff’s fascination with the city’s post-war renewal. He was especially drawn to places of transformation and transit, such building sites and stations, as evidenced by Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring (1971), Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground Station No. 4 (1978) and Outside Kilburn Underground Station, November (1984). Separated by a period of six years, the Kilburn paintings not only bear witness to the artist’s unwavering interest in his everyday surroundings but also the way in which even the most familiar subjects are in a state of permanent flux.

The artist additionally depicted buildings and places that evoked specific memories for him, such as Red Brick School Building, Winter (1982). This was a type of school building familiar to many English children growing up in the post-war period, and which reminded him of the primary school he himself attended in Spitalfields. The nearby church, one of London’s grandest baroque edifices, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, was the subject of another of his paintings, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer (1992). For Kossoff, these subjects were not just physical landmarks but ones in which there is a constant interplay between past and present, underscored by the charged and ever-moving brushwork. Leon Kossoff painted London all year round and always from life. Light and the weather determine the atmosphere of his works, together with his gestural technique and characteristic use of impasto. In an oeuvre that chronicles the ebb and flow of life in one of the world’s largest metropolises over the best part of a century, time and memory are important touchstones. While many of the locations that Kossoff painted have long since vanished, the places immortalised in the paintings on exhibition — the Red Brick School Building, (Willesden), Christ Church, Spitalfields, and Kilburn Underground station — can all be seen today.

Leon Kossoff is also renowned for his ‘translations’ of paintings by Old and Modern Masters. While he visited and drew in the National Gallery in London on a weekly basis, and had done from a young age, the drawings in this exhibition were mainly made from works shown in Royal Academy exhibitions: Francisco Goya’s paintings and Courbet’s The German Huntsman were included in the retrospectives dedicated to these artists in 1978 and 1994 respectively, while Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570-1576) was exhibited in Venetian Painting in 1983. Here too, Leon Kossoff worked from life: he made his drawings in the galleries before the actual paintings. Yet these are anything but academic copies. Leon Kossoff’s rapid, dynamic technique and repetitive strokes are unmistakably his own and the sketches, whilst faithful to the originals, are never identical to them. Hence the term ‘translation’. Captivated by certain Old Masters, or canvases by pioneers such as Cézanne and Courbet, Kossoff strove to analyse the psychological and emotional impact of the paintings by recreating it in his own work. It was both an intellectual engagement and an educational exercise. He wrote in 1987: “In my work done in the National Gallery, and elsewhere from the works of others, I have always been a student. From the earliest days…my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them, and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.” Leon Kossoff was particularly drawn to dramatic and intense works, or those depicting a struggle, as can be seen in the exhibition.

LEON KOSSOFF began his artistic training at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1943 but left in 1945 to complete three years of military service. He returned to St. Martin’s in 1949 and followed David Bomberg’s classes at Borough Polytechnic from 1950 to 1952. He then completed his training at the Royal College of Art between 1953 and 1956. Leon Kossoff represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996. His work is held in major public and private collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London.

XAVIER HUFKENS

107 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Loïc Raguénès @ CLEARING, Brussels - "Les animaux bleus" & "There are tears at the heart of things" - Two posthumous exhibitions

Loïc Raguénès

Les animaux bleus &

There are tears at the heart of things

CLEARING, Brussels

November 9 — December 22, 2023

Les animaux bleus and There are tears at the heart of things mark the two first posthumous exhibitions of French artist Loïc Raguénès (1968-2022) at CLEARING, Brussels showing works situated at the chronological extremities of his output, and which reflect the consistency of his artistic intentions.

Loïc Raguénès’ works—from his mid-2000s “neo-pointillist” pencil drawings, via hazy spheres painted on fog-laden backgrounds, to his abstract-figurative seascapes, all unfolded in chapters—have long acted as clues and gestures towards his innermost artistic questionings rather than a clear resolution or statement. His oeuvre, like the waves he so often depicted while posted in his Douarnenez studio on the northwest coast of France, is a perpetual ebb and flow between abstraction and figuration. A constant coming and going between the microcosm of texture and detail to the macrocosm of shapes, colour and lines, with an interest in the tipping point between the two.

Les animaux bleus, in the front space of the gallery, comprises 28 early drawings of animals that Loïc Raguénès sketched from life at the zoo whilst a student at the Besançon Art Academy. Lion, tiger, giraffe, baboon, birds: each animal is foregrounded in black outline and blue-grey pastel shading while their background consists of a textured, painterly white-out. Rather than a bestiary or a series of zoological illustrations, the young Loïc Raguénès was already brewing his formula for creating works which would explore the question of representation, abstraction, and figuration, as well as the idea of hierarchies regarding painterly subject matter. The restrained palette also acts as a prelude to Loïc Raguénès’ lifelong affair with hues of blue and grey which he employed consistently throughout his oeuvre.

In the main space, moving forward several decades, There are tears at the heart of things gathers a selection of the artist’s late works. A central in-situ painting, first executed in 2012, sees pink and blue dots placed across the entire rear wall. Using a template to outline the hundreds of circles, the work emerges from a meditative process that, despite the use of a cardboard cut-out guide, allows for spontaneity and chance. The modernist desire for order and rationalisation is flouted, the grid is atomised, and the circles are almost no longer incessantly self-referential. The work marks a transition away from his earlier compositions which employed strictly placed Benday dots and rasterised images towards a more freeform and painterly approach. It is no coïncidence then that a similar pattern blurs our vision, superimposed upon the exhibition’s seascapes: rain, snow, or an afterimage having stared at Loïc Raguénès’ ever-present dots for too long?

The framed works lining the gallery walls constitute a suite of gouache squares on paper which continue the artist’s dalliances with suprematist monochromes, the idea of the image as an icon, and seriality. Whereas in previous iterations of the works titles evoked fields viewed from above, it would seem perspective has here been shifted 180 degrees to gaze out into the aether, as the compositions tend to vibrate and gravitate, like planets, around a certain point. Across the whole series, a black square is recurrent, akin to a repeated musical theme. A preamble note to Eric Satie’s 1893 piece “Vexations” reads: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities,” advice that also seems appropriate when apprehending Loïc Raguénès’ seriality.

Another motif that the artist had been revisiting for some time is that of the cave. The three works to the rear of the gallery reveal Loïc Raguénès’ interest for Gustave Courbet who painted several works representing the source of the Loue River (La Source de La Loue). Drawing on his native landscapes, Courbet’s paintings (like those of Loïc Raguénès) form an ensemble depicting the same theme taken from different angles, culminating at the threshold of abstraction as a medley of greys and browns bordering the cave’s deep black mouth. Should we approach these works from another perspective, it seems the horizontal green and blue lines from Loïc Raguénès’ wave paintings are grasped, compressed and bent into semi-circles or monochromatic rainbows that neatly espouse a mysterious black hole.

Loïc Raguénès approached his practice with a restrained yet textured vocabulary of forms, colours, and techniques which he constantly re-explored or revisited. Inspired by his immediate surroundings (animals, sea, weather, planets), his practice involved a perpetual reshuffling of the deck of cards he had dealt himself. Each new chapter is birthed from an element of a previous one; a drop of distillate pipetted from one into the ocean of the next. Two tempera paintings on canvas bear witness to this methodology as well as the new directions he was intent on taking. Originating in the outlines lifted from blueprints, these two works constitute a geometrical resolution of other marine-related objects visible from the artist’s studio; sailboats.

Finally, amidst the chorus of works which crossfade elegantly between abstraction and figuration are several representational outbursts. Like a return to a foundation or a resistance to total rationalisation, a man in a red sweater, a sheep, and a lone goose not only gesture back towards the series of blue animals, but act as cryptic clues in an effort to understand where Loïc Raguénès may have navigated to next.

Les animaux bleus and There are tears at the heart of things will be followed by a presentation of the artist’s works at our New York space in late November.

Loïc Raguénès (1968, Besançon – 2022, Douarnenez) lived and worked in Douarnenez, FR.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Musée des Beaux Arts, Dole; La Salle de bains, Lyon; 40mcube, Rennes; Centre d’art image/imatge, Orthez; Musée François Pompon, Saulieu; Circuit, Lausanne; Galeria Zero, Milan; Patrick de Brock, Knokke; and C L E A R I N G New York and Brussels.

His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon; de Appel, Amsterdam; Musée des Beaux Arts de Rennes; Villa Arson, Nice; Casino Luxembourg; FRAC Ile de France, Aquitaine, Bordeaux, Languedoc-Roussillon; Centre d’art contemporain la Synagogue de Delme; Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris; Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Brussels; Various Small Fires, Seoul; Casey Kaplan, New York; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, and David Zwirner.

The artist will be part of the 9th Biennial of Painting at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in 2024.

Loïc Raguénès’s work is part of the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Le Consortium, Dijon; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris; FRAC, Ile de France; Bourgogne; Champagne-Ardenne; Corse; Franche-Comté; Nouvelle-Aquitaine; Occitanie Montpellier and Toulouse.

C L E A R I N G

Avenue Van Volxemlaan 311, 1190 Brussels

www.c-l-e-a-r-i-n-g.com

Sterling Ruby @ Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels - "DROWSE MURMURS" Exhibition

Sterling Ruby 

DROWSE MURMURS 

Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels 

Through 16 December 2023 

DROWSE MURMURS is Sterling Ruby’s most comprehensive exhibition with the gallery to date. Featuring four distinct bodies of new work—drawings, sculptures, paintings and ceramics—it provides a broad overview of the latest developments in his oeuvre. The presentation not only highlights the sweeping nature of his practice but also its material and thematic complexity. The contrasts that have shaped Ruby’s life—between his European roots and American upbringing, between rural Pennsylvania and urban Los Angeles, and between his father’s work for the military and his parents’ involvement with the hippie subculture—all serve as a catalyst for works in which the personal and political coincide. The title is borrowed from Allen Ginsberg’s poem Drowse Murmurs (1965) that echoes some of the most prescient themes of the exhibition, most notably the dialectic between war and peace, destruction and beauty.

Central to the exhibition are Sterling Ruby’s monochrome drawings, which he is showing for the first time. Executed in ink or graphite, they constitute an entirely new body of work. Raw and volatile energy fills each sheet in the same way Allen Ginsberg’s excoriating words hit the page. The Beat Poet coined the phrase ‘first thought, best thought’ to describe a type of truth-telling born from naked experience. Sterling Ruby’s stream-of-consciousness images, which also eschew artistic self-censorship, evoke explosions, cyclones, and nets. Yet fragile glimpses of nature can also be detected amidst their frantic lines, such as a spider’s web or flower.

Flowers also appear in the artist’s cast aluminium sculptures. The FP in the title stands for ‘Flower Power’, a slogan used in the 1960s and 70s to denote passive resistance to the Vietnam War. Ginsberg invented the phrase in 1965, the year in which he wrote Drowse Murmurs, and it served to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. An iconic photograph of a man placing a carnation inside the barrel of an M14 rifle, taken by Bernie Boston in 1971, captures the ethos. This image also featured on a poster in the Ruby household. Sterling Ruby’s sculptures are permeated with the same uneasy tension. Their slender forms—which reference his earlier wooden reliefs—resemble gun shafts and bayonets. They are typical examples of the artist’s regenerative practice and cast from assemblages of wood and other materials. Ruby salvages scrap from his creative projects and endlessly repurposes it, meaning that old works give rise to new. The flowers and foliage, all gathered from around the artist’s home and studio, were cast from life. Through these sculptures, Sterling Ruby also introduces a modern material into his work: aluminium. Synonymous with the space age, it is now a ubiquitous part of everyday life, thanks to its lightness and strength. But it also has extensive military applications. The metal played a significant role in the Vietnam War, for example, when it was used to manufacture people carriers and bombs. With their skeletal, almost spectral appearance, Sterling Ruby’s sculptures stand on the threshold of past and present. By establishing an analogy between militarism and activism, the works also raise questions about the conflicts that define our own epoch.

Other aluminium sculptures are shaped like windmills, a structure symbolic of progress and sustenance. Historic examples still punctuate European landscapes as reminders of a bygone age. Different versions arose in the US: the distinctive water-pump windmills that allowed farmers to conquer America’s ‘breadbasket’, the Great Plains. Both are turbines, although the latter have all but disappeared from the American landscape. On another level, Sterling Ruby’s sculptures also speak to rich visual and literary traditions. From the windmills of Hobbema and Vermeer to those of Malevich and Mondrian, or from Don Quixote to Alfred Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill, this is a machine whose power reverberates down the ages.

Sterling Ruby’s latest TURBINE paintings also include windmill-like forms. They relate to his earlier WIDW series, which included a motif that resembled a window. The shape has now acquired a rotational axis and been set in motion. The transformation is open-ended: are these blasted out windows, propellers or wind turbines? Devoid of references to time or place, the cruciform structures carve the pictorial plane into quadrants. Bold colours, some menacing and others more hopeful, create an indeterminate and volatile visual field. Clouds, wind, fire, smoke, smog, storms and dust all spring to mind. If these are indeed wind turbines, then they are ambiguous emblems. Whilst promising clean and sustainable energy, they also bear witness to the ecological ramifications of turbine-driven industrialisation and war. Other paintings in the series contain coruscating bands of colour, which Ruby achieves by pounding pure pigment into the canvas. It creates the impression of speed and velocity, or explosions and bombs. Here, the collaged motifs are geometric shapes that suggest airplane fuselages, border fortifications such as dragon’s teeth, or nodding donkey oil pumps.

In his recent ceramics, Sterling Ruby continues his exploration of the four-petalled flower motif, or quatrefoil. This archetypal image has multiple spiritual and heraldic connotations, including an association with the four cardinal winds. Ruby has also made a visceral series of ‘flowers’ with lobe-like ‘petals’, and articulated stems that resemble vertebrae. With their gnarled and pockmarked surfaces, and their similarity to arrowheads, they resemble archaeological finds from a post-apocalyptic age. Lucio Fontana’s ceramic crucifixes, in which form and matter dissolve through the pressings and mouldings of the artist’s hands, were a reference point when making these works. Sterling Ruby has worked the clay just as intensely, pounding it in the open air so that it gathers traces, both positive and negative, of the world outside the studio. Like excavations or aerial views of ravaged landscapes, they follow on from the shattered topographies of the artist’s Basin Theology series.

DROWSE MURMURS features works that are not pictorial, figurative or didactic, but which still contain identifiable and thought-provoking elements that say something about the world right now. The formal and material contrasts, together with the slippages between past and present, build into a rich visual terrain that touches upon some of the most burning issues of the day. When Allen Ginsberg published Drowse Murmurs in 1967, it was part of his Planet News collection: a penetrating and an unflinching reportage on his life and times. Sterling Ruby channels that same spirit, anno 2023.

STERLING RUBY was born in 1972, holds American and Dutch citizenship, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Sterling Ruby’s sculpture DOUBLE CANDLE (2018) is installed permanently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Exhibitions include DROPPA BLOCKA, Museum Dhondt- Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2013); STOVES, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2015); Belvedere, Vienna (2016); Ceramics, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2018, travelled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019–20, travelled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston). In 2014 he participated in the Gwangju Biennale, Taipei Triennale, and Whitney Biennial.

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Lesley Vance, Ken Price @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Fired and painted" Exhibition

Lesley Vance, Ken Price

Fired and painted

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

24 November 2023 — 3 February 2024

Fired and painted brings together a recent series of paintings by Lesley Vance (b. 1977) and a group of ceramic sculptures by Ken Price (1935-2012). Two American artists of different generations and disciplines but whose abstract works share a number of affinities. Taking scale as a departure point, Vance has pushed her practice in new directions for this exhibition, her fifth with the gallery. The presentation not only includes her largest canvas to date but also some of her smallest, together with an ensemble of medium-format paintings. Through the interplay of scales and volumes, Fired and painted suggests resonances between the different art forms and opens up a dialogue on the themes of colour, surface, form and spatiality.

Lesley Vance has long been fascinated by the relationship between ceramics and painting, both of which involve the application of fluid mediums onto neutral supports. Moreover, she also cites Ken Price as a key source of inspiration. A relentless innovator in the field of ceramic sculpture, Price is best known for his biomorphic forms that he finished, from the 1980s onwards, with acrylic paint instead of traditional glazes. Typically applying up to seventy layers of pigment and multiple colours to each work, he sanded these down to create striking, mottled effects. Colour is one of the key themes that links these two artists: both artists use its material qualities and allow it to determine their work in a physical and expressive sense.

Price and Vance also focus on reduction as a means of creation. Vance, who is interested in synergy and dissonance, often restricts her palette to a handful of shades in order to explore their full, tonal potential. In terms of composition, too, the act of removal is as important as the constructive process. She likens it to a form of ‘reverse collage’. Price, on the other hand, condensed a broad spectrum of colours into hues that read, from a distance, as a uniform colour value. He said: “Colour has been an integral part of most of the work I’ve made, but there’s not much to say about it. Colour is complete in itself. It doesn’t need any support from art, representation, language, or anything else. It’s hard to control... Colour conveys emotion, but you can’t really control that either.” Vance’s paintings, in which colour functions autonomously on both a structural and atmospheric level, echo this sentiment.

Both of the artists’ oeuvres revolve around movement. Price’s sculptures have a fluid, molten-like quality—as if a thick, viscous liquid has been stopped mid-pour. Vance’s paintings are dynamic compositions in which shapes and colours are indivisibly and inexplicably linked: they advance and recede, emerge and disappear, separate and converge. Price’s and Vance’s works are neither static nor lifeless. Both convey the idea of arrested movement in their art, as though motion has been temporarily suspended rather than permanently ended. And the roots of their practices, while abstract, ultimately lie in reality: Price found inspiration in the strange alien-like rock forms and ancient pottery of New Mexico, while an arrangement of objects, a glazed ceramic surface, or even another painting can all be catalysts for the gestures and shapes that determine the course of Vance’s paintings.

Price developed a highly personal approach to process and materials, and the same is true of Vance. His sculptures are flawlessly finished, inscrutable and luminous, and reveal nothing of the methodology behind their curious and otherworldly presence. The same sensibility is also found in Vance’s canvases, the surfaces of which are just as radiant and reticent. A mysterious quality surrounds both types of work: it is impossible to imagine the interior structure of a Price sculpture, just as the viewer will search in vain for a structural hierarchy in Vance’s paintings.

Finish is a crucial component of Price’s sculptures, which he described as “rounded forms with active surfaces.” Just as one might say of Vance’s paintings, in reverse, that they are “flat surfaces with active forms.” It is precisely this interaction—between colour, surface, form and spatiality—that links their work across disciplines and generations.

LESLEY VANCE (b. 1977, Milwaukee, WI, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Always circled whirling, her first solo institutional exhibition was recently organised by the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, USA (2023). Vance’s work is held in numerous public collections: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Her work is also currently included in 50 Paintings at Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee.

KEN PRICE (1935-2012) participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1979 and 1981. His first retrospective took place in 1992 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. A major travelling retrospective was organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012-2013) and designed by his friend Frank Gehry. His works are included in important public and private collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

XAVIER HUFKENS

44 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com 

David Adamo @ Rodolphe Janssen Gallery, Brussels - On the Fence

David Adamo: On the Fence 

Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels 

October 26 - December 16, 2023 

Rodolphe Janssen presents On the Fence, DAVID ADAMO’s third solo exhibition at this gallery. Talking about the show, David Adamo described his most current explorations in the following terms.

“I started the process for the show funny enough with painting. Something I haven’t really explored over the years as an artist, something I’ve definitely dreamt about but somehow too self-conscious to try. I spent the summer on a residency in Liguria at the former residence and studio of Danish artist Asger Jorn. For one month, I slept in his former bedroom, and I firmly believe he entered my dreams, and I got permission to paint by Asger’s spirit. I came back to Berlin and suddenly had the urge. As if a drain had suddenly been unclogged, something started to flow. I started with small still-life studies, looking a lot at cozy old catalogs of Cézanne, Manet, Bonnard. And for the first time in a while, I was actually enjoying it, enjoying coming to the studio, enjoying painting, laughing at myself, starting to experience the world in a different way, looking at colors, the light, noticing compositions. Totally engrossed in the process, not giving a shit, which is an attitude that had been missing. Maybe it isn’t always the smartest or strategic way, but arguably more important, honest and raw. I’m showing a few attempts here.”

For example, in Untitled (Elina 1), while I was painting over the summer, every once in a while, my partner would come over and look at my work in what I would describe as a suspicious manner, almost as if she was experiencing the mysterious waft of ripe unpleasantries. Using this as a starting point, I did a few studies of her at the studio and also at our home. Some of them I would show to her, and we would laugh uncontrollably together, which is pretty healthy, I think, or not. The thing I liked about the process is I didn’t have to look far to be inspired; the everyday moments are more than enough. I followed this process for a couple months and finally built up the courage to share some of my studies with Rodolphe. He was less than enthused about them and suggested perhaps I was wasting my energy. Understandably, most people in my experience (myself included) are very resistant to change.

Deflated, I returned back to my sculptures, which had been sleeping. Over the years, I’ve accumulated many works which I’ve exhibited and, for one reason or another, ended up on a shelf in storage, in hibernation. For the works in the show, I’ve dragged out a few of these old friends and started to reimagine them in a different way. Trying to let the material show me something else inside. There is always somewhere else to go. I knew I wanted to work on a series of busts as, over the last 8 years, I’ve been studying the subject in an interdisciplinary manner. Firstly, in my training as a barber and secondly, my extensive studies and teaching of the Alexander Technique, a method specifically looking at the dynamic relationships between the head, neck and spine. With fresh eyes, I woke up the works: gouging, digging, chopping, hacking, chiseling, hammering, grinding, sanding, painting, nailing, affixing, dressing, praying, crying, but most importantly, looking and listening. I let the painting process inform how I approached these works as well, allowing color, portraiture, gesture and posture to play a larger role in the group. They reflect upon different facets of my imagination and personality: the armored discipline, stubbornness, the knot in my stomach… The confused, cloudy, shy, punky characters that lurk in my brain and hide in the material. The infectious spirit of something that was there before but is now slowly revealing itself as another. Is it Asger Jorn haunting me? I hope so... Don’t know. I’m on the fence.”

DAVID ADAMO (b. 1979 in Rochester, NY USA. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)

David Adamo is a sculptor ‘avant la lettre’ due to his engagement with form and materiality. His sculptures of chipped away wood for example, express this interest in the materiality of the object very well. These sculptures are often surrounded by the wooden fragments that were chopped off, thereby referring to the creation process of the sculptures. In his humorous small-scale sculptures Adamo plays with the expectations of the audience. These sculptures appear to be everyday objects, but by further examining them it becomes clear that the objects are removed from their traditional context due to the use of impossible materials.

— LVB

Recently, David Adamo was included in solo and group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA; The Mordes Collection, West Palm Beach, FL, US ; M.A.C – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Lima, Peru; Museo de Arte de Rio, Rio de Janeiro; The Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY USA ; Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany; Whitney Biennale, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY USA, among others. His work is included in the collections of The Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY USA.

RODOLPHE JANSSEN

35 rue de Livourne — Livornostraat, 1050 Brussels

www.rodolphejanssen.com

Josef Hoffmann @ Art & History Museum, Brussels - "Josef Hoffmann - Falling for Beauty" Retrospective Exhibition

Josef Hoffmann - Falling for Beauty

Art & History Museum, Brussels

6 October 2023 - 14 April 2024

The Art & History Museum in Brussels presents the exhibition JOSEF HOFFMANN - Falling for Beauty. This exhibition provides an exceptional opportunity to discover an artist who understood beauty as an absolute requirement for individual and social transformation.

In October 1955, Viennese architect and designer JOSEF HOFFMANN (1870-1956) travelled to Brussels on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stoclet House, the project that came to be known as a “palace” and shaped his life and career. The enduring myth surrounding this building as well as the particular product culture that emerged from  the craftsmanship of the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese workshops), has dominated the approaches to his practice to this day. The exhibition JOSEF HOFFMANN - Falling for Beauty wishes to offer a broader perspective by presenting Hoffmann’s artistry, for the first time in Belgium, as it develops through  six decades of production. 

The timeless beauty of Hoffmann’s creations not only shows his relevance as a historical phenomenon but also as a source of inspiration for different generations of students, at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and elsewhere, making him especially an international reference for postmodern practices. Considering the challenge of introducing Josef Hoffmann in Brussels, this retrospective aims to provide a deeper insight in Hoffmann’s ideals and their evolution both due to and regardless of the diverse ideological and social circumstances in which they took form. The exhibition features a variety of well-known works together with rare pieces from private collections. The narrative is nourished by biographical details and new material on previously overlooked aspects; all to further extend our consideration of a leading figure in the field of modern design.

The sections of the exhibition are oriented around one or more architectural models ––including a new model of Hoffmann’s pavilion for the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914––that serve as epitomes and key references to consider constellations of furniture, objects, designs, textiles, and documents. In this regard, a juxtaposition of multiple narratives is proposed, covering every aspect of Hoffmann’s artistic production: architecture, design, decorative arts, scenography, writing and teaching. In addition, focus will go to his creative method as well as his use of colour.

This project is developed in collaboration with the Applied Art Museum of Vienna (MAK) and takes as its point of departure  the major scientific work presented in the exhibition JOSEF HOFFMANN: Progress Through Beauty (2020/2021), curated by Matthias Boeckl, Rainald Franz, Christian Witt-Dörring. The exhibition is a central event of the 2023 Art Nouveau year in Brussels.

ART & HISTORY MUSEUM, BRUSSELS

Parc du Cinquantenaire 10 - 1000 Brussels

www.artandhistory.museum

Melanie Bonajo Exhibition @ Art Brussels 2023 - Presented by AKINCI, Amsterdam

Melanie Bonajo

AKINCI, Amsterdam

@ Art Brussels 2023

20 – 23 April 2023

MELANIE BONAJO 

‘When the body says Yes’, Big Spoon, 2022 

Ultra chrome, canson Lustre, museum glass, 62 x 110 cm

Courstesy the artist & AKINCI

Discovery SOLO project by MELANIE BONAJO (they/them/theirs). The focus is on Melanie Bonajo’s recent project When the body says Yes (2022), an immersive video installation. In the Discovery Booth for Art Brussels melanie bonajo would like to give a glimpse into the totality of this immersive project that approaches touch and intimacy shown at the Venice Biennale. They present photographs arranged around the video still as a wall-covering poster at the back wall. The viewers are invited to experience tactility and comfort by sitting on the specially composed seats that the artist has made in collaboration with Théo Demans. The photo works are still photographs by the artist of the film When the body says Yes, a project that involved a group of international gender queer people. Through the presentation at Art Brussels 2023 the artist carries the message further and create a moment of reflection about when the body says Yes and what it means to give consent to the senses.

AKINCI

Lijnbaansgracht 317, 1017 WZ Amsterdam

akinci.nl

www.artbrussels.com