artlead’s short guide to Brussels Gallery Weekend 2018
For the 11th time already, Brussels Gallery Weekend officially opens the new art season. Every year the BGW becomes a little bigger, and this year’s program with 39 participating galleries and an off-program of close to 20 non-profits and institutions can feel a bit overwhelming. Especially since there are plenty of other galleries and off-spaces linking their first show of this season to the Gallery Weekend. To help you navigate, we made a small selection of shows to definitely see this weekend.
Generation Brussels
Laurie Charles – The anger of the intestine, 2017
Especially for the Brussels Gallery Weekend, Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte curated an exhibition of 12 young Brussels-based artist who don’t have any gallery representation yet. Generation Brussels wants to discover, recognize and give support to a generation of artists working in different media such as drawing, installation, painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography and video.
Generation Brussels takes place in the Vanderborght building – which also functions as the central meeting point for the BGW – and brings works of Antoine Carbonne, Laurie Charles, Céline Cuvelier, Marlies De Clerck, Antoinette d’Ansembourg, Hadrien du Roy, Alexis Gautier, Benjamin Installé, Antone Israel, Elina Salminen, Kato Six, and Daniel Wagener.
50 Rue de l’Ecuyer
Brussels
Sharon Lockhart- Movements and Variations in Two Parts
Sharon Lockhart shows new work at two (neighboring) locations: Gladstone Gallery and Jan Mot. Lockhart has spent years visiting the Sierra Nevada Mountains, often returning with sticks which she presented as gifts to friends. These physical traces of the landscape gained symbolic form in her relationship with the girls of Rudzienko, with whom Lockhart collaborated for her presentation Little Review in the Polish Pavilion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia. Through the sticks, Lockhart could share a part of her home with the girls and they became a unifying force for the group. For Movements and Variations Lockhart has cast a selection of the sticks in bronze. The exhibition presents them in two forms: a series of bronze sculptures and nine photographic portraits.
12 Rue du Grand Cerf
Brussels
10 Place du Petit Sablon
Brussels
Ed Atkins – Members
Ed Atkins explores the virtuality of our contemporary visual world and its profound effect on the reality of our embodied lives. His high-definition videos and powerful sound-tracks address existential questions about how love, sex, death, and relationships are experienced in the face of digital abstraction. Atkins’ video works are digital performances, as it is the artist’s voice and movement an imating the digital world. In these videos, as well as in his collages and drawings, Atkins is asking for the paradoxical capacity of media to let our material lives be present in a progressively dematerialized world.
4 Rue du marché aux porcs 4
Brussels
A Performance Affair
Moussa Sarr – Narcisse Metamorphosis Peacock Man, 2018
A Performance Affair is a second good reason to pass by the Vanderborght building this weekend. During BGW, A Performance Affair transforms the second floor of the building into an immersive space for three days of performances. During these days, APA will present a myriad of performances by emerging and mid-career artists, and featuring Violent Incident- an historic performance video by Bruce Nauman, an auctioned immaterial work by Philippe Parreno, and much more.
With Alice Anderson , Elena Bajo, Sanna Helena Berger, Julien Bismuth, Anna Byskov & Lidwine Prolonge, Jeremiah Day, Lieven De Boeck, Marijke De Roover, Carole Douillard, Tim Etchells, Nikolaus Gansterer, Ariadna Guiteras Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Emily Perry, Candida Powell-Williams, Mireia c. Saladrigues, Sarah & Charles, Moussa Sarr, Flore Saunois, Sarah Trouche, Joris Van de Moortel, and Laurence Vauthier.
50 Rue de l’Ecuyer
Brussels
Sterling Ruby -DRFTRS and WIDW / HEARTS + CLUBS
Xavier Hufkens presents a two-venue exhibition of new paintings and collages by Sterling Ruby. Ruby’s DRFTRS and WIDW series are two ever-evolving bodies of work that bear witness to the artist’s intense relationship with materials and his interest in issues such as sociocultural evolution, popular culture, and violence. The WIDW paintings are executed in acrylic, oil paint and collaged fragments of cardboard and textile on canvas. In their composite nature, they closely relate to the DRFTRS works on paper. But the materials used in this series reflect yet another form of archaeology: the excavation of the artist’s studio. Of this Ruby has said: ‘I realised that I could use my own history and older bodies of work as this kind of archaeological legacy.’
At Pierre Marie Giraud, Sterling Ruby presents a newly developed body of ceramic works. Evolving from his previous project, ASHTRAY, Ruby’s new exhibition HEARTS + CLUBS is the outcome of plastic transformations; clay forms morphing from vessels to figurative and totemic objects.
6 Rue Saint-Georges
107 Rue Saint-Georges
Brussels
7 Rue de Praetere
Brussels
René Daniëls – Fragments from an Unfinished Novel
Also opening during BGW is WIELS’ two floor retrospective exhibition of the work of René Daniëls! This show includes a number of historic paintings, some of which have been restored specially for the exhibition and have never been presented to the public before. An extensive selection of drawings completes the exhibition, offering a better understanding of how the vocabulary of the artist evolved.
354 Avenue Van Volxem
Brussels
NORMA
A group show curated by Maud Salembier, taking place in the historic Maison Pelgrims – combining past architectural styles as interpreted according to the taste of the time; akin to Norma Desmond, the character in film Sunset Boulevard, an ageing star of silent cinema homebound in her mansion. As in this Wilder film, the setting mirrors the personality of the main character. The Pelgrims house also seems lost in megalomaniacal memories, like an old lady trying to stop time: magnificent and proud, haunted by her past greatness – a fallen star, both tragic and disquieting at the same time. Like her, the house is equally dusty and obsolete, inhabited by the spirit of another time, ostentatious and seductive.
With Martin Belou, Nicolas Bourthoumieux, Aline Bouvy, David de Tscharner, Cristina Garrido, Maria Gil Uldemolins, Julie Kern Donck, Alberto Scodro, Michael Vandenabeele, Adrien Vescovi, and Sophie Whettnall.
69 Rue de Parme
Brussels
Christopher Wool
Vedovi Gallery presents nine works by Christopher Wool that articulate the artist’s process defined by milestones in technique, punctuating his prominent artistic career that has lasted over 30-years. The networks created between gesture and technique illustrate Wool’s evolution through complex tactics of abstraction, an evolution to become one of the most influential abstract painters of his generation.
11 Boulevard de Waterloo
Brussels
MEASUREMENTS
In collaboration with Brussels-based curator and collector Christophe Veys, Société made a group show around the physical units of standardisation that draw our relationship to the world and structure our perception. This exhibition takes a look at how the modern methods of measuring, weighting, counting, etc have influenced current artistic practice, and provide the context for their re-appropriation. This exhibition is a continuation of an earlier exhibition at Société on “time”, questioning the notions of objectivity and measurability, where fundamental and abstract notions define artistic methods.
With – among others – Art & Language, Mel Bochner, stanley brouwn, Martin Creed, Lieven De Boeck, Michel François, Hamish Fulton, Hans Haacke, OMA / Rem Koolhaas, Roman Ondák, and Rafaël Rozendaal.
106 Rue Vanderstichelen
Brussels
David Horvitz – When The Ocean Sounds
A final reason to pass by the Vanderborght building is the special presentation we made there with David Horvitz. Build around our 11th Billboard Series, this exhibition brings together several of Horvitz’s works that use large bodies of water as tools for reflection. Central to the presentation is David Horvitz’s billboard – accompanied by a postcard send by the artist to function as instructions on how to deal with the score, his new edition and an amazing new work titled Imagined Clouds (Brussels).
50 Rue de l’Ecuyer
Brussels
Jean-Marie Appriou – Griffe, langue, rose et écailles
For his third solo exhibition at C L E A R I N G, Jean-Marie Appriou presents a large scale sculptural installation, an ecosystem in cast aluminum and glass. Griffe, langue, rose et écailles unfolds on the banks of a river of quicksilver. It is magnetic, drawing animals – monkeys, piranhas, jaguars, serpents – and humans alike: flute-playing children, pert-buttocksed young men playing the lyre, and languid women dozing as their bodies seem to melt back into the earth.
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 311
Brussels