06 september 2021, Manuela Klerkx
Brussels Gallery Weekend in the spotlight: rodolphe janssen, Schönfeld Gallery, LMNO, Baronian Xippas, Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche
The ever lively Brussels Gallery Weekend will take place this year from 9-12 September. Around 40 galleries, museums and art institutions will be opening their doors, in addition to – as the icing on the cake – ‘Generation Brussels’ under the direction of Belgian curators Dagmar Dirkx and Zeynep Kubat, an exhibition dedicated in its entirety to young artists who live in Brussels.
Participating galleries in the Brussels Gallery Weekend that are also featured on GalleryViewer are rodolphe janssen, LMNO, Baronian Xippas, Schönfeld Gallery and the red-hot newcomer Sofie Van den Bussche, who will also be opening her new gallery space this weekend. Double the reason to attend!
Thomas Lerooy, Broken, rodolphe janssen.
rodolphe janssen will be opening with Belgian artist Thomas Lerooy, who most people probably know from his 22-metre high bronze sculpture entitled Tower, located on the seafront in Knokke, and American artist Betty Tompkins, who was not ‘discovered’ until later in life. Her now famous ‘Fuck Paintings’ from the 1960s gathered dust in her studio for over forty years, vilified and misunderstood by the primarily masculine art world of the time and the feminist women’s movements. At rodolphe janssen, she will be displaying her ‘Women Words’ paintings, featuring texts from female victims of sexual abuse affixed to copies of famous paintings with female models, from Vermeer to Leonardo Da Vinci and from Brassaï to Warhol.
Betty Tompkins, Women Words (Raphael #2), 2018, rodolphe janssen.
LMNO will be showcasing the creation, growth and disintegration of a cloud in the eyes of scientist and artist Pep Vida, who knows the blind spots in science better than anyone and uses them as the point of departure for his art. To Vidal, who holds a doctorate in Physics from the University of Barcelona, scientific precision and fantasy go hand in hand, leading to a new way of viewing natural phenomena like the creation of a cloud, the development of a rainbow or the ‘sudden’ dropping of a book that has been quietly laying on a bookshelf for years.
Pep Vidal, Untitled 27, LMNO.
Galerie Schönfeld will be showing the work of Tina Berning and Christina Zimpel, two artists who have never met, but feel a connection to each other’s work as they have become familiar with it via Instagram. Both have a background in graphics and work as an illustrator and portrait designer in fashion, but with a passion for the liberal arts. And it shows.
Tina Berning, 03/23/21 System, 2021, Schönfeld Gallery.
Yves Zurstrassen will be displaying a series of new paintings and – for the first time – a large number of handwoven carpets in two different, diametrically opposite exhibition spaces in the Baronian Xippas gallery.
Yves Zurstrassen, 20 03 28 SOMETHING ELSE, 2020, Baronian Xippas.
New kid on the block, Sofie Van den Bussche is relocating from a 30 m2 gallery to a 100 m2 space in the heart of Brussels and opening with the prominent and versatile artist Jacques Charlier, whose oeuvre is defined by a critical attitude towards the art world, art market and avant-garde clichés.
At 2 pm on 11 September, Manuela Klerkx will be offering a free guided tour to the five galleries. The tour will be held in Dutch and French and starts on Barthélémylaan 22, Brussels. To sign up for the guided tour, send an email to [email protected]. The tour can be easily done on foot or bike.
Read more about Betty Tompkins
