Group show
Belgique
Galerie Templon in Paris is presenting Belgique, a group show featuring nine artists, all leading figures of the Belgian contemporary art scene: Michaël Borremans, Peter Buggenhout, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Thierry De Cordier, Wim Delvoye, Jan Fabre, Hans Op de Beeck, Luc Tuymans and Jan Van Imschoot. The exhibition was born of Daniel Templon’s desire to pay tribute to Belgium’s creativity via a selection of artists he particularly loves.
It was developed in dialogue with Philippe Van Cauteren, artistic director of S.M.A.K, Museum of Contemporary Art in Gent. Over twenty works loaned taken from museums, private collections and the artists’ studios provide a subjective and beguiling overview of Belgian contemporary art from the 1990s through to the 2010s, combining drawings, paintings and sculptures.
The choice of works is personal and instinctive, opening the door to a series of unexpected encounters. Wim Delvoye’s subverted gothic objects sit side by side with the melancholy seas painted by philosopher and poet Thierry De Cordier; expressionist fantasies produced by the rarely exhibited Jan Van Imschoot rub shoulders with experimental work from the highly versatile Jan Fabre, an artist the gallery has represented for fifteen years. The exhibition conjures up many worlds, from Hans Op de Beeck’s night-time landscapes to Michaël Borremans’ still life and Luc Tuymans’s immobile characters. It also explores the violence of flesh and blood, physically present in Peter Buggenhout’s assemblages and simulated in Berlinde de Bruyckere sculptures.
Philippe Van Cauteren has written the preface for the Belgique catalogue, published to mark the exhibition and featuring a text by Bernard Marcelis.
Les artistes
Born in 1969, Hans Op de Beek lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realised numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses, and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder and silence.
Jan Fabre was born in 1958 in Antwerp where he lives and works. He has worked in the theatre and is an internationally renowned choreographer. Over the last twenty years he has also developed a body of art work based on a variety of materials, including blood, ball-point pen ink, beetle wings, bones, stuffed animals and marble. Jan Fabre is an inveterate draughtsman, creating sculptures and installations that explore topics such as metamorphosis, the dialogue between art and science, humankind’s relationship to nature and the artist as a warrior of beauty.
Born in 1963 in Ghent, Jan Van Imschoot has been living and working in France since 2013. Jan Van Imschoot’s exploration of the possibilities offered by painting have resulted in a body of work that draws its power from highly critical and dramatic themes and contains references to countless artists, from Tintoret to Luc Tuymans, Goya to Matisse. Jan Van Imschoot places his figures, decors and narratives at History’s margins, using assembled perspectives, strong tones, bodies in motion and brushwork he describes as ‘anarcho-baroque’. His work delves into a number of recurring motifs: freedom, censorship and the violence of political and ideological systems.
