Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
°1951, Antwerp (BE) – lives and works in Antwerp (BE)
Since the early eighties, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has produced an extensive oeuvre of drawings and other works on paper, as well as short videos. A straightforward feminist tone pervades in all her works, in which the erotic meets machine-fetishism. Interior, if not domestic spaces often serve as settings for her drawings and collages, from which dream-like futuristic enactments between human and machine-like forms unfold. In the nineties, handmade paper works gave way to computer graphics, while text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven’s proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics.
Music plays an important role in Van Kerckhkoven’s creative production in parallel to her visual output, and she and her husband Danny Devos have stood as a key pair of the Antwerp experimental music scene under the band name Club Moral (1981–now).
To contemplate the entire work of AMVK is to enter an idiosyncratic world, littered with fragments and sketchy representations from the arts, is to be confronted with abstractions, clusters of ideas and quotations ranging from occult philosophies to advanced sciences and technological concepts.
An extremely ambitious project is taking shape, one that is not satisfied with a sensitive, aesthetic representation of the world, but has set itself the task of confronting the limits of the logical and the transparent of the rational with the obscure, its unthinkable, normative opposite. A dialectic project, therefore, that cannot easily be described or organised. As dense and multiform as her techniques and performances are and as challenging as the ideas and concepts she incorporates into them, an acquaintance with her work is more like a journey through an oeuvre, which in itself is an adventurous trip through the fields of interest and focal points that have marked the counterculture over the past forty years.
(courtesy of Barbara Thumm)
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Axis, 2008
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – A Familiar Triangle, 2008
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Vagina Dentata, 2014
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Blank, 2017-2018
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Blik Eyes, 1999–2017
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Zweep (Calais), 2015-2016
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Verborgen Lagen (Hidden Layers), 2014
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Kunstverein München; Kunsthalle, Bern; Kunstmuseum Luzern; and M HKA, Antwerp. Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions at venues such as ICA, Philadelphia; The Artist’s Institute, New York; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; and S.M.A.K., Ghent. She also participated in Manifesta 7 in Italy in 2008.
Her work is also represented in many important public collections, such as Kunsthalle Bern; Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels; M HKA, Antwerp; and the University of Chicago.
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of her work.
You can also find more works by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven on her own website.
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – installation view at AMVK M HKA, Antwerp 2018
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – installation view at AMVK M HKA, Antwerp 2018
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – What Would I Do in Orbit, exhibition view at Kunstverein Hannover in 2017
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – What Would I Do in Orbit, exhibition view at Kunstverein Hannover in 2017
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – What Would I Do in Orbit, exhibition view at Kunstverein Hannover in 2017
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – The Strange Life of Things), installation view at Zeno X, Antwerp 2016 (Photo by Peter Cox)
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – installation view at Manifesta 7, Trento in 2008
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Nothing More Natural Wiels, Brussels (BE), 2008
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven – Flower Power, exhibition view at Grote Markt, Antwerpen, 2015
