Les collections

Manuela Klerkx

6 ways of building

In how many directions can you take the concept of building something? When building anything from a house to a bird's nest it’s all clear what’s going on. So far so good. But what if you relate that question to art? The first thing that comes to my mind is that there are so many forms of building in art: from sculpture to installation art and from building three-dimensional kinetic art to assembling separate parts into a solid whole. For this collection I am looking for six different forms of building.

Leyla Aydoslu

0 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 26 Oeuvres disponibles

5 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations

The work of Leyla Aydoslu (Ghent, 1987), who trained as a painter, consists of deconstructed and reconstructed architectural elements she adapted to the scale of her own body and the space for which the work was originally intended. Space - and its boundaries - is an essential part of Aydoslu's research. She sees her work as the expression of a process in which unforeseen circumstances, the properties of the materials she uses and the space itself play a greater role than a preconceived concept or theory. This approach leaves a lot of room for her own intuition. She let go of painting and the idea of a carrier and thus of demarcation. She eventually found a carrier in space itself. Her constructions and installations are both robust and elegant and often show traces of architectural and sculptural elements such as a plinth or column, a free-standing wall or a framework: the forms that she dismantles and breathes new life into.

(Represented by FRED&FERRY)

Jef Faes

3 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 19 Oeuvres disponibles

5 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations

Faes uses the perfect hexagon of the honeycomb - those perfect and orderly structures made by honey bees - as the starting point of his art. Working at the intersection of science and art, he combines and manipulates natural patterns and geometric structures. In this way, natural patterns - such as those of the perfect hexagon - are transformed into purely abstract elements and geometric structures. His innovations in colour and optical illusion with linear designs led him to paint hexagonal patterns on panels and building elements. The carefully painted moiré pattern, which is created when two sets of lines are superimposed at slightly different angles, or have slightly different line spacing, breaks the rigidity of the geometric figures and creates a strong optical effect that references at the Op Art.

(Represented by Shoobil)

Suchan Kinoshita

1 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 13 Oeuvres disponibles

2 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations

Suchan Kinoshita (1960, Tokyo) became known in the 1990s for her 'huts', installations consisting of makeshift structures made of wood or polystyrene foam. This often involves a subtle interplay of objects, sound and spatial perception. The visitor entering one of Kinoshita’s huts is a spectator and a participant at the same time.

With a German mother and a Japanese father, Suchan Kinoshita grew up between two different cultures. She is trained in various artistic disciplines including (experimental) music, theatre and visual arts. 'Life as a stage and the stage as mirror of life' is her motto and many of Kinoshita's installations or, as she calls it, 'public shifts' move within this context. This means that her performances, buildings or installations derive their meaning in part from recognizable, everyday events and from the interaction with the spectator. In contrast to artists who make architectural structures or classical sculptures, her constructions are usually of a temporary nature.

She creates many 'open situations' in which time (the sequence of events) and space play an important role. This makes the work not only dynamic, but also partly unpredictable. At Art Basel in 1998, for example, she showed a structure consisting of two identical, empty spaces. A spectator who entered one of the rooms read a sign on the wall opposite the door with the text 'when you read this, the door will close behind you, it will open again when someone enters the other room'. Some visitors experienced this work of art as frightening because they felt dependent on the presence or absence of others. The work 'Stick empathy' was created in response to the death of Kinoshita's dog Gina, who brought her increasingly larger sticks from a nearby forest. She created a memorial in the form of a performance in which she clamped a large branch between her jaws while an ode written for her dog sounded from the speakers and was sung by herself in two voices.

(Represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects)

Myriam Vangenechten

0 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 8 Oeuvres disponibles

1 Spectacles ᛫ 0 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations

Myriam Vangenechten, who trained an architect, uses modules that can be combined in various ways so that, depending on the choices of the 'player', a minimalist, abstract structure is created that can just as easily be dismantled again and can give rise to another exciting build. Just as children build towers with wooden blocks, Myriam Vangenechten offers the viewer the opportunity to build their own constructions with her modules. The only fixed parts of the work are the scale, dimensions and material of the individual parts and the cognitive and intuitive choices of the 'maker'. The playful character of Vangenechten's approach and the severity of the industrial, hard material form a contrast that gives the work an extra charge. The constructed forms created by stacking contain both geometric and organic elements because Vangenechten combines both: round corners versus pointed corners, openings and fillings, placement on top of each other and next to each other, all possible building principles are reviewed. The light and shadow effect that can arise due to the irregularity of a construction is often of a breath-taking beauty.

(Represented by ZEIT)

Kimball Gunnar Holth

1 Éléments multimédias ᛫ 31 Oeuvres disponibles

6 Spectacles ᛫ 3 Points forts ᛫ 0 Recommandations

‘In my work, painting is the main thing, but I look for ways that I can escape it. The heart of it, you get rid of, so everything else is there. It’s all pointing towards what’s painting. So I would use those moments before and after making the artwork as a way of making art.’

You can also take the idea of 'building' in art in a completely different direction. For example, in the case of the Australian Kimball Gunnar Holth (1982). He is building an oeuvre in which painting is central, without making a painting that will be hung on the wall as a successful end product. Holth starts from the idea that a work of art does not have to look like a work of art to still be one. But what determines the boundary between what is and what is not art? Holth's work is concerned with the thin line between 'doing nothing' and 'doing something' that makes the essential difference between the two categories and determines whether or not something belongs to the art world.
For 'Cleaning Cabinet', for example, he used cleaning products from the gallery and from home, which he placed on the middle shelf of the cabinet to use. On the other shelves he put products from the kitchen cabinets of the gallery that he does not need. In doing so, he made the question insightful 'When does something matter and when not?', which is basically the same question as 'When is something recognizable as art and when not?. For example, a box is a container, but it also has qualities that allow you to see it as a canvas and treat it as such.

Holth is building an oeuvre that revolves around painting as long as it isn’t a painting. Like a painter, he makes compositions, uses his arms and hands, uses colour, brushes and paint and makes choices. Only not in relation to the painting as an art-historically loaded end product - 'a cliché', according to the artist - but as an attempt to make a painting that will never be made.