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about Michaël Van den Abeele

When Michael Van den Abeele first started making video’s, years ago, he created simple visual animations of Marlboro cigarette packages or pin-up girls by using Word – the Microsoft computer program most people in the world use to make text documents – and not by using video. In other words, he took one method of processing and ordering information and used it for something completely different.

It should come as no surprise that when he started painting in earnest, he did so through an intricate process in which his paintings begin their life as carefully composed computer renditions, as screen-designed collages of colours and forms that sometimes take and repeat elements from his previous works. These are then copied from his computer-screen onto the canvas by hand. One might never guess this from the sumptuous, large-scale paintings that result from it: they are so painterly, so layered with his signature enigmatic forms, which sit between smoke and abstraction, so seemingly made from the spontaneity of a painter’s touch. And yet, everything about the aura of the medium and the singularity of the result is critically undercut by the artist because of the fact that they exist first in another, less material form: as an infinitely reproducible and yet tangible screen image, a mere collection of pixels, light and computer-codes. In short, this self-confessed copyist -for it must be said that repetition, reproduction, and the illusion of originality lies at the very heart of Van den Abeele’s practice -uses nearly everything that is particular to painting against itself.

(courtesy of Wiels)

Michaël Van den Abeele has exhibited internationally at, among others, Museum M, Leuven; Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels; Ibid Projects, London; Wiels, Brussels; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Levy.Delval, Brussels; Gaudel de Stampa, Paris; and Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius.

about Sarah & Charles

Sarah & Charles’ s work comprises various forms of arts: installations, decors, sculptures and videos. The artists have a particular interest in narration, fiction and mise-en-scene. In their work, both front and backstage are visible. That way the viewers can at the same time observe the construction of the fiction and the fiction itself. Their entire artistic practise revolves around the creation and simultaneously subversion of illusions.

On the one hand, they stimulate the imagination through the use of images that reflect the illusions fostered by the viewer, on the other hand they constantly dismantle those illusions. Besides staging, memory is also an important theme in the work of Sarah & Charles, memories and the personal experience of it.

about Joelle Tuerlinckx

Joelle Tuerlinckx’s art is based on a sustained and time-consuming engagement with simple things. For three decades, she has gathered found items or articles of daily use that crossed her path and methodically collected them in a comprehensive archive. These objects have inspired her to reflect on what it means to be a human being—they are, to use the artist’s term, elements of the real.

Her work grows out of the observation, experimental application, and, as she calls it, transcription of these elements: a kind of (re)reading that seeks to strip them of their ostensible banality and comprehend and show them for what they truly are. To this end, Tuerlinckx employs a wide range of sculptural and painterly approaches, including the manufacture of replicas and the translation of objects into different materials. She plays with shifts of scale and alterations of surface textures, which she manipulates with techniques like colorizing or scanning and reprinting.

(courtesy of Kunstmuseum Basel)

Joelle Tuerlinckx has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Kunstmuseum Basel; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Arnolfini, Bristol; Wiels, Brussels; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Mamco, Geneva; The Power Plant, Toronto; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; S.M.A.K, Ghent; and Witte de With, Rotterdam.

Group shows include Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; IAC, Villeurbanne; Secession, Vienna; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; M HKA, Antwerp; Generali Foundation, Vienna; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and MoMA, New York.

Upcoming projects include the 2017 Skulpturen Projekte in Münster, and a big solo exhibition in Dia, Beacon in 2018.

Joelle Tuerlinckx is represented by the following gallery;
click through to discover more of her work.

Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne / Berlin

Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna

about Aline Bouvy

Aline Bouvy’s multidisciplinary practice is a way of expressing her refusal to compromise and adapt to systems in our society which aim to regulate our longing, conforming it to the norms and values which shape that same society. Bouvy questions and denounces how the images we have of ourselves and of humanity are determined by this morality.

In this way, Bouvy is attracted to the non-conventional – not to fetishize elements from the margins of society, but from a wish to normalise what is considered out-of-bounds, and thereby adjusting the prevailing morality. In earlier works, Aline Bouvy used with images of stray dogs and weeds, or made bas-reliefs of anuses with phallic shapes stuck in them. The male nude is a recurrent motive in her work, again not as a fetish but rather a counterweight to the naked female body that seems to be everywhere, not only throughout art history but also in our contemporary visual culture.

Aline Bouvy questions how we handle contemporary cultural production and takes a stand against norms and values society imposes upon us.

about Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.

But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

(courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel)

Claire Fontaine has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Jewish Museum, New York; CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Frac Haute Normandie; FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur; Museion, Bolzano; MUSAC, Castilla y León; El Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Aspen Art Museum; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.

Group shows include Centre Pompidou, Paris; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; KW, Berlin; MOCAD, Detroit; Paradise Row, London; IMO projects, Copenhagen; Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the biennales of Shanghai, Sydney, Rennes, Istanbul, Lyon, Moscow and Venice.

Claire Fontaine is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of her work.

Galerie NEU, Berlin  

T239, Rome  

Regina Gallery, Moscow  

Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York  

about Kasper Bosmans

Kasper Bosmans dives deeply into the rich cultural history of materials, objects, traditions and customs. The references in his work betray a broad spectrum of sources, from folkloristic stories and cultural practices to historic research on painterly techniques or botanical cross-breeding. He continuously expands on his interests, subjecting them to careful scrutiny.

Legends is a series in which this affluence of references is clearly visible. The title refers to both a story of the past, as well as a brief explanatory text. By combining a multitude of references and compiling the different elements from his field of study into a new visual narrative, Kasper Bosmans creates a highly poetic visual mythology opening up the possible meanings all individual elements might have.