Johan Grimonprez (1962, Roeselaere, Belgium) is a renowned filmmaker and artist. His critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalisation. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasises a multiplicity of histories and realties.
Read MoreUsing documentary material, found footage, historical items from archives, his own home videos, news pictures, advertising, video clips and excerpts from Hollywood films, Grimonprez tries in his own way to give some meaning to the havoc wreaked by History. His films 'speak to the need to see history at a distance, but at the same time to speak from inside it'. Other themes include the relationship between the individual and the mainstream image, the notion of zapping as 'an extreme form of poetry', and the questioning of our consensus reality, which Grimonprez defines as: 'a reality that is entangled with the stories we tell ourselves in the worldview we agree on sharing.'
His works are part of the permanent collections of major museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Kanazawa Art Museum (Japan) and Tate Modern (London); the National Gallery, Berlin; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Denmark; Tate, UK and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Grimonprez divides his time between Belgium and New York and is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York).
Text courtesy FLATLAND.
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Related Press Long Shadows 4 December 2017, Frieze In addition to its ample cruelties and endlessly confounded sense of 'it can't go on like this much longer, can it?', 2017 has also been a year of profound historical torsion, marked by the return of specific figures and fears wrongly presumed to have been left in the present's wake. Consider, for instance, the starkly renewed appearance of fascists...
Related Press Johan Grimonprez '| blueorchids |' 31 March 2017, ArtReview There is a moment in Johan Grimonprez's short arthouse documentary | blue orchids | (2017) when Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and now well-known leftwing author and activist, describes the emotional toll of being exposed to the trauma of war –...
Related Press The Uncertain Dependability of Truth: Johan Grimonprez’s New Film Makes Clear It’s One Thing We Can Count On 12 March 2017, ARTNews The question, possibly of the century: How did America end up with a reality-TV president? Might it have been Russian hackers or disenfranchised voters? blue orchids (2017), a film by the New York-based artist Johan Grimonprez showing at Sean Kelly, proposes a virtually incontrovertible answer: the uncertain dependability of 'truth.'
