Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to participate in the third edition of the Ballroom Project Art Festival from Wednesday 12 to Sunday 16 May 2021.
This mini-fair takes place in the historic Borgerhub building in Antwerp and is held in conjunction with the urban event Antwerp Art Weekend.
For its third edition, the Ballroom Project gathers about twenty contemporary art galleries, located in Belgium and the Netherlands, and invites each of them to present the work of one to three artists maximum.
On this occasion, we are pleased to present a selection of four recent works by the Belgian artist Joris Van de Moortel.
A multi-talented artist, adept at plastic and visual experimentation, Joris Van de Moortel presents 4 works characterized by a common theme. The theme of the Ship of Fools, whose origin goes back to Plato and which was made famous in the 15th century by the writer Sebastian Brant, is the point of departure of this one-way journey toward a marginalized, spiritual and underground world, which is at once parodic and transgressive. Through the allegory of a ship carrying madmen and destined to be shipwrecked, Joris Van de Moortel questions the artist’s place in society and our conscience when faced with the materialistic norms and values of the time. A depiction of drifting at sea which can also be construed as a metaphor for exile or quarantine, and which carries a clearly political dimension.