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over Peter Downsbrough

Since the end of the 1960s, conceptual artist Peter Downsbrough changed the perception of art thoroughly. At the basis of his strong diversified oeuvre, lies a highly distilled, visual vocabulary, which he uses to examine a given space in a very personal and precise manner. In this way, Downsbrough frequently adopts written language in the form of conjunctions, prepositions, verbs and/or pronouns and applies them to walls, floors and ceilings, often in combination with taut lines made of black tape.

Words like ‘as’, ‘if’ or ‘but’ have a double function: on the one hand, they work as iconographic characters, which emphasize and reveal the space, while on the other hand, they offer the viewer several possibilities of interpretation. Despite the impersonal nature of the elements, Downsbrough manages to create a very familiar word/image-universe with minimal interventions and a limited vocabulary.