The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium / Abstracte kunst uit België, een selectie
Luc Tuymans (curator), Joris Dhooghe, Cathryn Drake, Jesus Fuenmayor, Bruno Leitao, Ulrich Loock, Kate Mayne, Ken Pratt, Gregory Volk
Parasol unit, 2016
€50,00
Exhibition catalog in an hand numbered edition of 1200 copies. Our copy is new and in perfect condition.
Curated by Luc Tuymans, this selection of Belgian abstraction spanning two generations and fifteen artists—hence the “gap” of the title—is not what is to be expected. The Belgian painter describes the works as possessing “an element of concreteness.” This notion embraces both the physicality of Pieter Vermeersch’s Untitled, 2015, where swipes of rich oil paint are dabbed on a slab of striated marble, and the witty, vegetable-sized bronze cast Brussels Sprout, 2012, by Gert Robijns—perhaps a play on the name of their capital but certainly reality made abstract by casting.
Tuymans anchors his exhibition with Francis Alys’s television-test-pattern paintings and several Raoul de Keysers, including a standing work derived from the lines of a soccer field, Zevende Linnen Doos, 1971. These pieces counterpose the exhibition’s nonrepresentational centerpiece, an installation by duo Carla Arocha & Stephane Schraenen, Column, 2015, a matrix of mirrored squares hung around a painted column, situated on the gallery’s two floors. The work resembles a glittering, reflective piece of optical geometric abstraction in three dimensions, while its colors and structure echo the adjacent Philippe Van Snick geometric wall painting, Transition, 2015, also sited on both levels. Transition consists of a single column-width line bisecting a rectangle, which suggests day and night with bright and dark colors respectively. Despite the visual richness of his selection, Tuymans’s selection veers towards a more cerebral rather than an expressionistic sensibility.
ISBN: 9780957351882
