ART BRUSSELS 2012
Kati Heck, Entführung der Mutter mit Hase, oil, charcoal and toilet paper on canvas, courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery.
Eating Mussels in Brussels Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Touristy and Sometimes Doing Something Touristy Can Become Poetic, by Andrea Alessi
Francis Alÿs once did a walk from the Museum of Science and Industry to the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, mapping the journey with the unraveling thread of his blue sweater. The Belgian native is known for his “walks”, performative perambulations numbering too many to list here. They link sites separated by space and time; they chart national and political histories onto landscape; they open onto questions of surveillance and urban existence; and perhaps most importantly, they playfully highlight the subjective journey of the individual in time and geography.
Miriam Böhm, Interlude IV, 2012, Chromogenic color print, 31 x 35 inches, courtesy Ratio 3.
If I’d been feeling cleverer and less exhausted from standing for an entire train journey from Rotterdam to Brussels, I might have planned an Alÿs-style walk on a recent trip to the EU capital. As in the artist’s Stockholm walk – and in the paths of so many visitors – one could map Brussels within and between its museums. Wander through the palatial Royal Museums of Art, stroll in a southwesterly direction to the modernist industrial building of Wiels, Brussels’s best-known contemporary art center, all the while charting the route with a trail of powdered sugar blown from a street vendor’s waffle. Or perhaps you could let loose one French and one Flemish speaker into the city. One carries a cone of chips, the other a bottle of mayo. When they meet, they must speak to each other in English.
Eddie Martinez, Dream Scape, 2012, oil and spray paint on canvas, © Eddie Martinez, courtesy Sorry We're Closed.
Miriam Böhm, Interlude IV, 2012, Chromogenic color print, 31 x 35 inches, courtesy Ratio 3.
If I’d been feeling cleverer and less exhausted from standing for an entire train journey from Rotterdam to Brussels, I might have planned an Alÿs-style walk on a recent trip to the EU capital. As in the artist’s Stockholm walk – and in the paths of so many visitors – one could map Brussels within and between its museums. Wander through the palatial Royal Museums of Art, stroll in a southwesterly direction to the modernist industrial building of Wiels, Brussels’s best-known contemporary art center, all the while charting the route with a trail of powdered sugar blown from a street vendor’s waffle. Or perhaps you could let loose one French and one Flemish speaker into the city. One carries a cone of chips, the other a bottle of mayo. When they meet, they must speak to each other in English.
I pose these truly terrible (or at the very least corny) ideas only to bring up the notion of adding further poetic – if bad poetry – meaning to what is essentially the under-informed wandering of a tourist. You could make yourself feel more singular of purpose – as you follow the throngs of people from the Grote Markt (Grand Place), past numerous chocolate and waffle shops (roll your eyes at me, but I’ve been there and I’m not making this up), to the Mannekin Pis (the oddly famous peeing boy fountain) – if you envisioned your movements as art. Stopping to indulge in overpriced mussels and chips along the way might not be the best financial decision, but it is a tasty one. And one in which another famous Belgian artist, Marcel Broodthaers, would have approved. In addition to le/la moule’s wordplay, in which mussels sculpt themselves, the artist exploited the Belgian gastronomic stereotype, equating culture with cuisine. Food can be poetic, touristy, and delicious. Triumph of the Mussels indeed.
Mike Kelley, Buttered Colored Vision of the Land O’ Lakes Girl, Peche Island, piezo pigment paint on rag paper, framed, edition of 5, © Mike Kelley, courtesy Patrick Painter, Los Angeles.
Whether the journey is your destination or you’re just here for Art Brussels, prepare to do some legwork in Brussels...
...Click here for more on Andrea's wanderings through Brussels...
See you in Brussels!
–the ArtSlant Team
FAIR WATCH - Davis Rhodes
Davis Rhodes, Installation view; Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery.
Andrea Alessi recently spoke with Davis Rhodes, who is among the artists presented in a solo show format at Art Brussels, with Office Baroque Gallery. Read more about Rhodes latest work in this week's Rackroom interview:
DR:...The point is just what it does. Nothing inside the pieces is meaningful. It’s about staging an unstable presence – of the works and of the viewer.AA: So, for you, the encounter is paramount?DR: Yes, the encounter, and the reality of the work...
ARTSLANT INSIDER* - Ione Citrin
Ione Citrin - With a background in the performing arts, Ione uses visual art as yet another communicative channel. Adhering to no one style, medium, or subject matter, Ione works in such diverse media as painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage. A Chicago native, Ione lives and works in Los Angeles. Her current exhibition, at the Admiral's Club at LaGuardia Airport in New York, remains on view until June 1, 2012.
FAIR WATCH - Ellen Harvey
Ellen Harvey, Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 49 framed watercolors, © Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden/Berlin.
Ellen Harvey's work mines and reuses romantic, clichéd notions of art: the picturesque, the decorative, kitsch. At Art Brussels, Ellen Harvey will be showing a collection of paintings of the Citadelpark in Gent, painted according to the rules of the picturesque established in the 18th century, with Galerie Gebr. Lehmann. She will also showing new work and her Black Paintings after George Petrie with Meessen de Clercq. For more on Ellen Harvey's work, read Yván Rosa's review of her NY Beautification Projecthere.
TALK OF THE TOWN - Looking East: Picks for Art Brussels
by Nicole Rodriguez
Art fairs — the feeding frenzy of the art world. Many of us visit them to take in what we haven’t seen, or haven’t seen enough of, at our local galleries and museums. We go to stare and be stared at, but mostly to find out who is “stare-worthy”. Fairs remind us that we are in the business known as art and that the booths next to us are curiously keeping tabs on our traffic flow and sales (we know you’re peeking!).
For Art Brussels 2012, the Belgian fair is turning 30 and with this milestone comes a change in direction. Always a forward thinker — paying particularly close-attention to emerging contemporary artists and their youthful gallery counterparts — this year Art Brussels will up their innovative profile that much more by putting the young galleries in the foreground as the initial welcome to visitors and as the official tone-setter of the fair. With more than 2,000 emerging and established artists gathering at the Place de Belgique to face an ever-expanding international market of collectors, critics and enthusiasts, there is no better place to do so. Amongst the craziness of the coat-drop, the catalog pick-up and the champagne-bar, Nicole Rodriguez scopes out the Brussels-bound Berlin gallery scene and makes her picks for the names and works that prick her ear.
Aleksandra Domanović, Installation view, From yu to me, 2012, Kunsthalle Basel, Paper-stacks (2009 - present), Courtesy of Tanya Leighton.
Tanya Leighton and Soy Capitán are two of the curatorial-committee-selected “First Call” galleries that greet you on the way in. Established in 2008, Tanya Leighton is a gallery invested in double takes. With a program dedicated to the re-examination of historical frameworks and marginalized figures, Aleksandra Domanović is nestled perfectly into the repertoire and an impressive inclusion in the booth. Born in the former Yugoslavia (present-day Slovenia), Domanović’s works focuses primarily on the re-contextualization of online content and images. In Paper-stacks (2009-present) the artist accrues images of scenes of war from the former autocratic nation on A3 and A4 paper that bleed into the margins comprising — only in their accumulation of stacks on the floor, with persistent repetition — a full picture of historic symbology that unveils the past and examines its place within the nation’s present. Tanya Leighton will also show works by Dan Rees and Oliver Laric.
For more of Nicole's Berlin-based picks for Art Brussels, click here.
ARTSLANT INSIDER* - Artegiro Galleria
Salvatore Calì, Shapeshifter – Piave (giugnoduemilaundici), 2011, stampa digitale su dibond, 75x50 cm.
Artegiro Galleria - Artegiro Galleria in Montefiascone, Italy, presents Timeless / Senza Tempo, from April 21 to July 21, 2012, featuring four successive installations by Salvatore Calì, Daphne Cazalet, Mahoney Kiely, and Anita Matell. Timeless / Senza Tempo is an investigation in the moment, in the "nick" of time--the cut that produces an irruption in reality as we perceive it. The contemporary philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's work is the departure point for this artistic investigation, balancing between acts and effects, as each artist transforms the gallery.ARTSLANT INSIDER* - Quentin Pauluis
Quentin Pauluis, Ki, digital composition
Quentin Pauluis - After obtaining a doctorate in neurophysiology, Quentin Pauluis now experiments with sculpture, painting, digital art, and everyday life. Pictured above is a Ki, one in a series of the artist's grey-scale digital compositions with totemic significance. Pauluis lives and works in Brussels.
ARTSLANT INSIDER* - Kathryn Hart
Kathryn Hart, Metamorphosis, 2012, mixed-media on wood panel, 49 x 43 in.
Kathryn Hart - "My works reflect the human condition, all of its crags and crevices, what we want others to see and what we hide…" After establishing a national reputation as a representational painter, Kathryn Hart turned to highly abstracted work and conceptual-based painting. The works' tactility is key: like a sculptor, Hart balances the painting’s surface as much by touch as its visual qualities. Kathryn Hart currently resides in Larkspur, Colorado.
ARTSLANT INSIDER* - Harriet Bellows
Harriet Bellows, Portrait of Doubt, 2012, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 cm.
Harriet Bellows - Both Harriet Bellows' series of abstractions and her portraits demonstrate a predominant concern with form, line, balance, color, structure, and simplicity. Bellows has an MFA from NY State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, has exhibited nationally, and is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum/Luce Foundation. Bellows resides in Durham, North Carolina.
ARTSLANT INSIDER* - Debbi Chan
Debbi Chan, Cricket, 2012, watercolor and ink on silk, 17 x 10 in.
Debbi Chan - Debbi Chan's representations of the natural world stem from traditions of Chinese painting, and find expression primarily in watercolor and ink paintings on silk and rice paper. Chan also creates deep relief carvings in natural materials such as wood, stone, bone, antler, and ivory, as well as working in other media such as embroidery, artist books, etchings, and prints.
Thank you to Art Brussels and all of the galleries, organizations, institutions, curators and artists who bring us this Brussels extravaganza.
For more information on our Special Edition packages featuring ArtSlant Insiders and Watchlist for galleries, artists and art services, please contact Sunny@artslant.com.
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