Interior and the collectors occupied several spaces of hotel Amigo during Artbrussels art fair. This group show in a luxury hotel pursues one of our constant issue of inhabited space as exhibition space in another context and other constraints.
COLLECTION n°8
with JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET / ALINE BOUVY / WANG DU / ALBRECHT DÜRER / HR GIGER / GREGOR HILDEBRANDT / IŠTVAN IŠT HUZJAN / MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN / ADRIEN MISSIKA / ANNE NEUKAMP / DAVID DE TSCHARNER
Curated by Christel Montury and Fabien Villon (Interior and the collectors)
April 19 - 22., 2018
Hotel Amigo, 1 rue de l’Amigo, Brussels
Here, we become collectors and we decide on the choice of artists, not by following a theme or a particular issue but through a more personal logic that allows us to cross genres and mix emerging artists with established artists. The showcased artists are not there to decorate the walls, they bring an added value, a reflection, a way of viewing our time. Some question the limits of our perception of reality, others are buried in the limbo of our unconscious. The palace becomes the ideal place to reveal them. Appropriating a space is a commitment of trust and a requirement towards the host. Whether one is drinking, eating or sleeping, this is a way to experience a state of mind. It’s a frame, an interior space that each customer occupies differently. The constitution of inhabiting has a greater need of poetry, imagination and fantasy. The hotel is not a passageway like any other, it is an inhabited place. The hotel is the opposite of a white cube, It doesn’t disappear behind the artworks. Whether in a room, a corridor, an elevator, a vestibule, a meeting room, everything is an excuse to allow a customer to find themselves in front of an artwork. Whatever the time of day, the visitor may appreciate or not this moment but he will have been feeling an emotion.
Jean-Baptiste Bernadet
Born in 1977, lives and works in Brussels and New-York. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s references range across a broad spectrum of art historical precedents, from Monet, Vuillard and Munch in the past to Joe Bradley and Josh Smith in the present. Like his forebears in color painting, Bernadet uses the ways that colors, and their interaction, both activate the senses and allow the viewer to reflect back on the nature of that sensory activation, something which we realize in conditioned by both us and the artist being products of a certain time and place.
Aline Bouvy
Born in 1974 in Brussels, lives and works in Brussels. Aline Bouvy questions through a multidisciplinary approach to issues related to the breadth of society. She claims a certain unknown freedom in relation to the norms that unconsciously model our desires and which dictate to us what is morally and aesthetically acceptable. From this perspective she tries, not to put herself on the fringes of society, but rather to integrate these elements/residues, considered from a moral point of view as “dirty” or aesthetically “ugly”, in her creative process in order to liberate herself from any categorization. Never provoking, she makes it her duty to highlight the crude and outdated side of these waste elements.
Wang Du
Born in 1956 in China, lives and works in Paris. Wang Du has lived and worked in Paris since 1990. He has taught in the art department at the University of Paris VIII and the École supérieure d’art de Brest. Wang Du works in a range of media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and multi-media. His statement, “I am media, I am reality, I am image,” could be seen as an interpretation of the concepts behind his work. He believes that “the completely digital third reality is constructing a contemporary society and culture that needs to be constantly redefined.” Thus, his work redefines a series of concepts within reality from different perspectives, which is also the statement he has made since he declared, “I am the spokesperson for reality and the masses.”.
Albrecht Dürer
German painter and engraver (Nuremberg 1471-Nuremberg 1528). Albrecht Dürer was a painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe when he was still in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in communication with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 he was patronized by emperor Maximilian I. Dürer is commemorated by both the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches. Dürer’s vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), are more Gothic than the rest of his work. His well-known engravings include the Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His watercolours also mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium. Dürer’s introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics, perspective, and ideal proportions.
Hans Ruedi Giger
Born and died in Zurich (1940 - 2014)
H.R. Giger was a Swiss artist and designer known for his nightmarish science-fiction motifs. Giger is best known for his book Necronomicon (1977), as well as his design work for Ridley Scott’s 1979 feature film Alien. “Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don’t really think it is,” he once said. Born Hans Ruedi Giger on February 5, 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, he went on to study architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zürich. His first successful attempt at reaching audiences with visual art came in 1969, when a painting of his was published as a poster. Giger cited Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí as major influences on his stylizations of bodies and machinery. Before becoming involved in the production of Alien, Giger was recruited by the avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky to be a designer for his unproduced film version of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965). Though the film was never completed, it gave Giger a chance to produce a number of intricate objects and artworks based on the novel’s themes and characters. Over the decades that followed, he continued producing work for films, music videos, album covers, and videogames. Giger died on May 12, 2014 in Zürich, Switzerland. Today, much of his work is housed in the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland.
Gregor Hildebrandt
Born in 1974, lives and works in Berlin. In his artistic practice, Gregor Hildebrandt makes extensive use of pre-recorded cassette tapes as material in his pictures and installations. The tapes are applied directly onto canvases and photographic prints and in room-sized installations. In his paintings, he adheres the coated side of cassette tapes onto a canvas, presses on it with a brush or roller, and rips the tape off to create the defined, yet sporadic lines on his works. He repeats the process before finally gluing them onto the canvas for good to create what he calls the “negative” painting. For sculptures, he shapes vinyl records into bowls, sometimes stacking them to create what the artist calls a “sonic wall made of pillars of records.”
Although Hildebrandt’s work makes formal reference to Minimalism, the addition of a great number of subjective and autobiographical citations actually deliberately repudiates this strategy. For Hildebrandt, the cassette tape as artistic medium, especially in its original function of storage medium, fulfils an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures. Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer.
Ištvan Išt Huzjan
Born in 1981 in Lubljana, lives and works in Brussels. Ištvan Išt Huzjan is an artist whose works create tension between opposing poles: avant-garde and neoavantgarde, public and private, material and immaterial. The artist’s personal narrative facilitates his examination of different media, while also revealing Huzjan’s need to be on the move and explore the media’s boundaries. Therefore, the viewer is sometimes left with an impression that Huzjan is a wordsmith whose verse may at first seem finite but really offers a proliferation of infinite meanings and forms: poems that somehow exist at the end of words. (Text by Tevž Logar)
About Unnamed image (2018) : « Unnamed image consists of a manikin arm I found in one of the buildings in Brussels where temporarily I had my studio in 2012. Once on the wall it was carrying many different things but I never exhibited it. It was only in 2018 when I brought a broken umbrella that I’ve found in the street after my grandmother’s death that it took final shape. My grandmother worked all her life in an umbrella factory and materials / tools factory workers used to become extensions of their bodies. This work is about exposing what we carry but is not directly visible to all.» (Ištvan Išt Huzjan)
Michael Jones Mckean
Born in 1974 in Micronesia, lives in New York. Whether in the form of collages, gallery scale or building scale installations, Michael Jones McKean’s sculptures attempt to balance the living and the inert, the human and the non-human, in which each entity is given an equal ontological value. Following the footsteps of assemblage and actor-network theories, McKean depicts a reality in which human conscience is no longer the sole determiner, a reality as a purely emerging state, constantly redefined by the correlation of the various agents inhabiting it. His compositions mix together ready-mades and handmade replicas made out of paper, wood and silicone. The objects are organised within the gallery space, or more often, in luminous boxes in pastel shades that frame and delimit the idiosyncratic relational systems in each ecology. This enclosed structure is what paradoxically restores the sculpture as such, giving it a unified dimension and simultaneously bringing it back to a form of flatness. The volume then blends with the image, the sculptural sustainability with the digital stealth, the space with the screen. ( text by Emmanuelle Chiappone Piriou, from Catalogue “Au-delà de l’image III”)
Adrien Missika
Born in 1981, lives and works in Berlin. The work by Adrien MISSIKA is to be found at the meeting point of travel experience and exotic representation, advertising iconography and subjective involvement. Through a wide range of media, from photography, video, to sculpture and installation, the artist records his finds encountered during travels to the USA, Hawaii, Turkmenistan, India, Egypt, Russia, Lebanon, Brazil, to name a few. The work by MISSIKA challenges, as much as it plays with, the vocabulary of advertising and visual systems developed by the travel industry. Advertising is nourished by fetishes and totems encouraging exotic perceptions and reducing this sought-after unknown to a certain number of timeless signs like palm trees, waves, sun, that form caricatural, partial, if not populist items. Traveling, for Adrien MISSIKA, is rather a way to somehow resist to theses flat perspectives and representations. The artist inscribes his scenarios in the timeline of this elsewhere, inducing subjectivity and strangeness into these territories, temporarily perverting their state and our space representations. When the world has become ‘transparent’, a way to reappropriate it would be to inject new layers of perceptions, blur their immediate lecture and reinject forms and shapes. The use of video recording challenges the still perception of this elsewhere and highlights its moving and evasive nature. Text by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
Anne Neukamp
Born in 1976, lives and works in Berlin. Anne Neukamp diverts the vocabulary of the contemporary visual language that surrounds us: logos, emblems, icons, pictograms and signs by rendering them fundamentally ambiguous. Her paintings produce a floating state between intelligible motifs and an abstract, incomplete and loose cosmology. They destabilize the viewer’s perception by creating unusual situations that are stretched between reality and illusion, challenging different painting clichés or contradictory “styles” and collapse multiple senses of space into one visual surface.
David de Tscharner
Born in 1979 in Lausanne, lives and works in Brussels. Based between Brussels and Paris, Swiss artist David de Tscharner has developed a body of work that includes experimentations in different artistic fields such as collage, video or publishing but it is through sculpture that he asserts himself progressively. Using elements such as time constraints, geographical contexts, reappropriation and participative processes to magnify the materials he handles, he turns sculpture into a catalyzer that draws links between intimate and social experiences. The profusion, sometimes confusing, of his assemblages reveals an unfailing curiosity and a strong interest for the notion of loss. In this sense, David de Tscharner’s practice can be linked to the Heideggarian idea of «Holzweg», a path that leads to nowhere except to one’s being in a state of exploration.
About Interior and the collectors
Interior and the Collectors is an artist-run space founded in 2011 by Christel Montury and Fabien Villon, who also jointly serve as the curators. Situated in a modified residential apartment on 40 Rue Tramassac, Montury and Villon created Interior and the Collectors as a new exhibition format to bring emerging and established artists from around the world together in Lyon. By positioning the art in a home environment, complete with standard furnishings and appliances, Interior and the Collectors gives visitors the chance to experience the art with the intimacy usually only afforded to private collectors. Open to the public on Saturdays from 2pm – 7pm, the space is also available for private short-term rentals, allowing a total immersion in the experience. A new “collection” is now presented every 4 months. Past featured artists include Xavier Antin, Elisabeth S. Clark, Megumi Fukuda, Taro Furukata, Gary Colclough, Regina José Galindo, Christian Jankowski, Jan Koch, Samuel Richardot, Yorgos Sapountzis, Anne E. Wilson (2011), Nicolas Garait-Leavenworth, Alexej Meschtschanow, Renaud Regnery , Slavs and Tatars, Geerten Verheus (2012) Gregor Hildebrandt (2013) Alicja Kwade, Wang Du, Shawn Gladwell, Anne de Vries, Fabien Villon, Lothar Hempel, Alicja Kwade, Ella Mievovsky, Anne Neukamp, Marnie Weber (2015-2016), Antoine Donzeaud, Hr Giger, Béla pablo Janssen, Ella Mievovsky, Mika Rottenberg, Clément Rodzielski, Sandra Vaka Olsen, Le gentil garçon, Motoko Ishibashi, Hannu Prinz, Marc Desgrandchamps, Sebastian Burger, Bernard Frize (2017).
Photos: Christel Montury