Axel Vervoordt Gallery is proud to announce its participation in the next Art Brussels art fair. This year we will present a group show centred around man’s quest of finding a place in the space that surrounds him. How do the nature of man and space interact, how do they influence each other in a fluent and non- hierarchical way? The artists shown in the first part of our stand answer this question from an architectural point of view. They have created their own language of forms by means of which they reflect on man’s presence in the here and now. A second part of our stand is devoted to artists that approach this question in a more poetic and emotional way. They create a new, pictorial dimension that pulls the viewer in and makes him reflect on and feel connected with a unified, infinite space.
THE ARTISTS
Gutai artist Sadaharu Horio often uses objects from his immediate surroundings. By colouring things he finds on the spot and by making one-minute drawings, he shows that art resides in his everyday surroundings.
Also inspired by the everyday is Lucia Bru. She isolates and deduces pure abstract shapes from her surrounding and adds a human touch to them with her sculptures and drawings.
Angel Vergara and Kurt Ralske extract shards and essences from the world of images, in our time an enveloping mental space. Vergara paints on Plexiglas, placed on videos of mass culture and Ralske’s video works are composed of thousands of faces.
For his Facades series, Markus Brunetti captured religious buildings around Europe, architecture which aimed to overwhelm by way of physical superiority over man’s small stature.
Also architectural are the sober designs of Renato Nicolodi. Their stark rationality and concrete colours are reminiscent of bunkers, mausoleums, and temples. The models are inaccessible to the viewer, coaxing one into reflection.
The practice of Marco Tirelli too has a strong architectural aspect. It consists of drawings, sculptures and large scale paintings of imaginative and recognizable geometric forms, trapped in arresting contrasts of light and darkness.
With his floating sculptures German artist Otto Boll cuts through space. He makes visible the not yet visible. His works are a spatial expansion of thought and feeling. They are an experience and unsettle the viewer’s conception of solidity.
Hyong-Keun Yun is a leading member of the KoreanTansaekwha art movement Yun is much inspired by nature and attempts to capture the essence of organic, natural processes. His quest lead to simple compositions of bold squared-shaped colour fields. Yun makes utmost use of the materiality of paint and canvas and simplifies the picture plane.
Michel Mouffe’s work overcome the two-dimensionality of the canvas and result in an experience of spatial relationships. His quasi-monochrome paintings open the viewer's eyes to the 'sensibility' of space. Colour is used as a means of expressing the limitelessness of space. The viewer is drawn into Mouffe's paintings to encounter pure space.
KIM SOOJA – BOTTARI
In response to the violent events of last month in Brussels, the Korean artist Kimsooja will present a new installation at our stand, dedicated to the victims of the attacks. Bottari, meaning ‘bundle’, is a site specific installation made of used clothes worn by different citizens, you and me.
Kimsooja is an internationally-acclaimed conceptual and multidisciplinary artist who was born in Daegu, Korea, a city known for its textile industry. She is an artist on the move, deeply engaged with the outside world, a traveller on a pilgrimage of discovery and openness with all that she encounters.
In her ongoing Bottari series she’s a traveling laundry woman, collecting the discarded clothes and textiles of people who remain unknown to us. She wraps, or bundles, the forgotten items with brightly coloured and richly textured fabrics so they become like treasures, intimate and precious. Bottari reveals the artist gazing at the intimate link between each country’s textile culture and its people, gender relations, politics and society. It invites the viewer into a realm that explores the boundaries of poetry, visual anthropology and socially relevant topics.
REDISCOVERY: YUKO NASAKA
This year we are given the opportunity to present a solo installation of Gutai artist Yuko Nasaka in the REDISCOVERY programme of the fair. Next to our stand visitors can rediscover the work of one of the most prominent voices of Gutai’s last generation. Nasaka’s spatial quest is of a universal and almost cosmic nature.
“Do what no one has done before!” This was the single and powerful declaration of Gutai’s founder Jirō Yoshihara that guided the Gutai Art Association through more than twenty years of innovation and individual expression.
Gutai—Japan’s most important avant-garde art movement (1954-1972)—has regained its prominent place in art history only in recent years. Whereas male proponents of the group’s first generation, such as Saburō Murakami, Shōzō Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga and Jirō Yoshihara, are well known in the art world, the highly individual process and innovative work of Yuko Nasaka is still finding its way to the general public and is therefore worthy of REDISCOVERY.
Yuko Nasaka (Osaka, 1938- ) was one of the few female members of the Gutai Art Association. She joined in 1963 and became a key member of the group’s second-generation activities. Her work from this period is inventive, experimental and original. She displays a masterful use of technology and cutting-edge industrial materials—two hallmarks of Gutai work—through her use of brightly hued car lacquer.
Her large, grid-like relief works are a modular series of square wooden panels, which she coated with a thin layer of glue, plaster and clay, and then placed individually on a homemade mechanical turntable. As the panel rotated, she used a palette knife to carve patterns into the material, a gesture she compared to working on a potter's wheel. She finished the panels with a fine spray of car lacquer, misted with an auto- factory air compressor.
The meaning generated by Nasaka’s circles is infinite and open to many possible interpretations. This is an essential quality of every authentic Gutai work. For example, the circles seem to be a direct reference to mankind’s attempt to make a first landing on the moon in the 1960s. Although it was never her intention to imitate the moon, her circles definitely possess a moon-like allure, bringing to mind man’s incessant reach for the stars and his place in the unfathomable expanse of the cosmos.
Axel Vervoordt Gallery represents these artists: