Brothers forever.
Duo exhibition Koen Muller & Rik Vermeersch
From 16 January 2022 to 20 February, Koen Muller and Rik Vermeersch will exhibit unique and recent works at Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche in Brussels under the apt title 'Brothers forever'.
In an interview with Hilde van Canneyt, in March 2014, Koen Muller says : "Philosophising is something I do especially with the artist Rik Vermeersch, a very good friend of mine. He knows me through and through. We are ruthlessly hard and do not spare each other. This honesty takes us further".
The exhibition reflects two opposites who find each other in art, each with his own individuality and personality.
Both artists have known each other since they were sixteen. They studied together at the Hoger Instituut voor Beeldende Kunst Sint Lucas in Ghent, went to school together, exhibited together and never lost sight of each other and have grown into an intense friendship until today. Both are draughtsman, painter and sculptor.
Rik Vermeersch (Kortrijk, 1949)
(son of sculptor José Vermeersch, father of four artists: Pieter Vermeersch, Tinus Vermeersch, Robin Vermeersch and Lowie Vermeersch)
Rik Vermeersch works and lives in Meulebeke.
The artist wants to continually demarcate reality. I have the best experience of this when I am not painting. Painting is a weakening of that experience, and that gives the complete feeling that I want to grasp something that is elusive'. Appearance is so close to disappearance, and in the middle between the two, reality reveals itself. Not as in a grey area in between, but somewhere where all 'colour' has its right to speak. Rik Vermeersch is looking for the depiction of reality out of, as was stated before, an infinite respect for reality. I see the beautiful and therefore I want to be a medium without discolouration, without blemish, I want to paint as impersonally as possible. Just like Gerhard Richter, Rik Vermeersch wants to give his paintings 'the most unartistic, impersonal, and distanced character possible'. He wants to develop in such a way that he can better delimit the world, in order to do justice to the amazement of seeing, which is the motor and the source of every new work.
(Matthijs Van Dijk)
Koen Muller (Lokeren, 1948)
(father of Fien Muller (design bureau Muller Van Severen), uncle of artist Sofie Muller)
Koen Muller lives and works in Eksaarde.
He is an expressive and inquisitive person whose purpose in life is to understand by doing. Koen Muller does not like to call himself a figurative or abstract painter, both are subject and incidental to plastic materialisation. Of himself he says: "I like to mix styles, it can be fertilising. Knowledge has nothing to do with abundance, but with depth. I create structures out of chaos. I eliminate on the basis of visual processes that I have appropriated.
In the interview with Hilde van Canneyt quoted above, he states: "I am constantly working on self-enhancement and self-development and I always want to place myself - for myself - a bit further in time. I want to tap into new facets all the time. I want to explore, to shift something, but I am sensitive to how someone else looks at it.
I look at my work as if it belongs to someone else. I distance myself quite immediately. What I think of today is important. The NOW is essential and so is the act of doing".
Opening on Sunday 16 January 2022 from 2 pm to 6 pm.
The exhibition runs from Sunday 16 January to Sunday 20 February 2022.
Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 2pm to 6pm or by appointment.