Pavel Büchler – Experience
Tommy Simoens Gallery, Antwerp
Tommy Simoens is pleased to present Experience, Pavel Büchler’s third exhibition with the gallery and his first at our new location on Antwerp North. Bringing together works made between 1999 and 2025, the exhibition offers a measured meditation on sound, duration, labour, and time – on the everyday behavioural loops that sustain the artist’s practice.
Across four decades, Büchler has pursued a singular investigation into the subtle intersections of listening, language, and material memory. The works in this exhibition stand, as it were, in the precise overlap between Samuel Beckett and John Cage – between endurance and attention, silence and chance. If Beckett and Cage transformed absence into experience, Büchler offers its
home-recorded version: the precise yet absent experience of nothing happening.
“There is really nothing creative in it,” he once remarked, “and yet it is the catalyst of creative production.” His work begins where productivity ends – in the persistence of routine, recording, rearranging, and waiting.
In Table ↔ Turntable (2025), Büchler charts the changing positions of his desk and record player in every studio he has occupied, from Cambridge to Manchester. The six superimposed drawings, printed in distinct colour versions, read like a cross between architectural plans and musical notation. They translate the modest routines of daily work into a visual score, where thinking and repetition become indistinguishable.
The new work Experience (2024) – published on the occasion of the exhibition – returns to the artist’s formative years in 1970s Prague, when contraband Western music circulated through bootleg tapes. Among those recordings was Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe – endlessly copied from a single smuggled record until its hiss and crackle became part of a generation’s collective memory. Büchler revisits this sonic imprint by removing the song itself, leaving only the noise of the original vinyl’s surface.
Further on the exhibition features important works as LIVE (1999), TONIGHT (2003), White Label (2003), Encore (2005), Dear Mr. Cage, (2005), 3’34” (2006), Lou Reed Live (2007), The Score (2008), 12:00:00 - 12:04:33, 17 October 2008 (2008), Beckett’s Cage (2019) and Veterans (2021).
For the occasion of the exhibition the gallery is publishing the fully illustrated catalogue
“Pavel Büchler: Working Methods 1988-2025”.