Curator’s selection from G VI collection.
French, born 1974, El Khnansa, Morocco
Underneath
2017
Paint, plaster and cement on canvas
diameter 173 cm
Three years old Latifa Echakhch moved with her parents from Morocco to France. In 2002 she graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyonand settled in Switzerland, which became since 2007 her hub to make exhibitions in France, Switzerland, Israël, Germany, USA, Italy, Spain and the UK. She participated to Manifesta 7(Bolzano) in 2008, to the tenth Biënnale de Lyonin 2009, the Venice Biennale in 2011, the Sydney Biennale in 2012 and the Sharjah Biennale in 2013. In 2011 she won the Mies van der Roheprize in Krefeld and in 2013 the Prix Marcel Duchampin Paris. She participated in 2015 to the Istanbul Biennale.
The artist has a vivid interest in systems and structures underlying the important cultural themes of our time, always deconstructing the many layers of her work’s subjects.
The sky has previously appeared in Echakhch’s work La dépossession, where it is printed across a collapsing theatre canvas and suspended from the ceiling. In this earlier work, the sky is used as a motif to deconstruct the spectacle and intrigue of the theatre. In Underneath, Echakhch gives the sky material form. Rendered in cement and applied to the canvas, it is no longer just a motif but also an object, capable of being destroyed. Here, an element we usually associate with permanence loses its stability, taking on a state of a ruin that underscores the uncertainty of the present and speaks to the loss of a common space. This tondowork refers to the oculusAndrea Mantegna painted in 1465 for the Camera degli Sposiin the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, where the visitor can have a glimpse of the sky through a circular trompe l’oeilpainting underneath the ceiling.
Curator’s selection from G VI collection.
Italian, born in 1978 lives and works in Brussels.
10 x 10 (Single Mothers)
2014
jacquard textile (wool), supporting steel structure
445 x 176 cm
Research plays an important part in the work of many contemporary artists, represented in our collection by p.eg. Danh Vo, Goshka Macuga, Latifa Echakch, Paulina Olowska… Biscotti is specifically interested in tension between the vision of the individual and the collective memory. The work 10x10, Single Mothersis one of four carpets made for an exhibition at Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, on the occasion of the Mies van der Rohe Prize received by the artist. Formally the design was inspired by the work of Lilly Reich, partner of architect Mies van der Rohe who designed the former house and now Museum for the textile industrialist, importing the principles of Bauhaus architecture and carpet design in the region. Practically at the same time the Nazi administration adopted the punched card system developed by the American Herman Hollerith in 1888 (founder of IBM) and refined by Willy Heidinger in 1910, to acquire an overall view of the German population so as to divide more easily its composition. The idea of punched cards goes back to 1801 when Joseph-Marie Jacquard used it to develop his Jacquard loom, enhancing the fabric’s surface tactility and colour subtlety. Along these lines the artist developed her work, combining a study on the Brussels’ population with Hollerith’s and Jacquard’s punched card system with statistics of the 2001 census and the 2006 National Register, to – in this case – compile an image of the single mothers in this city, literally the interweaving of the social situation and the individual. Texture and data in one object.
Biscotti uses Brussels as a hub to travel the world in search of subjects for her art. Many projects are situated in Italy, but others also in Ethiopia, Russia, Lithuania, Belgium, Turkey… Her work has been showed in CAC Vilnius (2012), Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento (2010), the Nomas Foundation, Rome (2009), Secession, Vienna (2013), Wiels, Brussels (2014), Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld (2015) and Museion, Bolzano (2015); group shows at MAXXI, Rome (2010-11), Witte de With, Rotterdam, Museu Serralves, Porto (2010), Manifesta 9, Genk and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). In 2013 the artist was invited to the 55th Biennial in Venice. In 2014 she received the 15th Mies van der Rohe Prize in Krefeld.
Curator’s selection from G VI collection.
French, born 1978. Lives and works in Antwerp (Belgium).
Waiting For You
2017
250 x 197 cm
Tapestry
Edition AP1/3/3 + 1 AP + 0 AP
Laure Prouvost graduated at Goldsmith College and Central St Martins college in London. She lives and works in London, UK and Antwerp, Belgium. After receiving the Max Mara Prize for Women [2011], Prouvost was the first French artist to win in 2013 the prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary British artists and/or living in Great Britain. She will represent France at the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2019. Laure Prouvostis known for films and installations characterized by richly layered stories, translation, and surreal moments. Her seductive and disorienting tales toy with the audience’s ability to become fully absorbed by a single narrative. Her unconventional approach to text, montage, cinematic conventions, and imagery create a distinct visual language that is engaged in an ongoing conversation with the history of art and literature.
Tapestry is one of Prouvost’s media used to circumnavigate the terror of the black box being the dark space in which film has to be shown to the audience, but film is just one of the medias she employs to tell the tale of her very personal narratives. Objects, sculpture, tapestry are part of each installation in which she narrates the story of her Grandad, the conceptual artist, who disappeared digging a tunnel from his north London home to Africa. Granma still does not believe her husband is lost forever. To kill time she decided to make tapestries illustrating her disarray and lasting love. Waiting for Youshows a languorous reclining woman holding a bunch of celery. The scholar of classical culture knows celery symbolizes death in the ancient world.
Curator’s selection from G VI collection.
Gdansk, born in 1976,
Painter, photographer and filmmaker. Specialized in projects where artistic means are combined with elements of functional art.
There's Nothing Not After Daisies, 2013
Olie op doek
200 x 230 cm
Painter, photographer and filmmaker. Specialized in projects where artistic means are combined with elements of functional art.
Olowska makes her work in murals and performances with references to Pop Art, graffiti and Soviet propaganda. She often uses Western avant-garde processes, especially Dada and Pop Art and the popular iconography of pre-1989 Poland. She creates stunning mixes between Western and Eastern European art, such as collage techniques from Rauschenberg and the Nouveaux Réalistes with Polish rock posters and political ephemera from the eighties. She tries to give a voice to forgotten artists, especially women from the socialist period in Poland.
In 1995 and 96 she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and from 1997 to 2000 she studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. She received scholarships from institutions in The Hague, Lisbon, Kitakyushu and Amsterdam.
According to Olowska, art can change the world. She developed a romantic vision of art as a means to achieve a utopia. Hence her interest in the utopia of modernism, as spelled out in the principles of the early Bauhaus, also among the Russian constructivists of the early twentieth century.
In 2003, a collaboration with Scottish Lucy McKenzie culminates in a Nova-Popularna / New Popular salon-cafe about places where bohemian artists meet and elements of the Arts & Crafts Movement are incorporated.
From then on Olowska regularly develops projects such as Sie musste who acquire Idee eines Hauses as Metapher in which a dialogue between a female painter and architect about utopia and reality lead to a series of portraits about Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Charlotte Periand.
Subsequent points of interest are the reconstruction of a New York hairdressing salon from the twenties, the reconstruction of a ball in Poland in 1968, the updating of neon lighting from the Warsaw streets during the communist 50s and 70s.
Olowska also forms the basis for the recognition and recognition of some forgotten artists, such as the Englishman Pauline Boty or the Polish Alina Szapocznikow.
In 2011 she made the Ostalgia exhibition for the New York New Museum full of personal reports about life under the communist regime and the new post-Soviet countries.
Curator’s selection from G VI collection.
USA, born 1946, Macon, Mississippi, USA.
Route One: Box Two: VI
2017
Graphite and paper on wood
182.9 x 243.8 cm
McArthur Binion is an older artist who lived for a long time in the shadow of his colleagues. One of eleven children, from Detroit, he has been the first Afro-American obtaining a degree with Cranbrook Academy (1973). Moving from Chicago to New York, he became friends with Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, who supported him. Later he returned to Chicago. His art is based on Minimal Art, especially his interest in the grid as supporting element, although he thinks the “hand of the artist” cannot be substituted to industrially produced materials. He is a painter. Minimal Art’s seriality (LeWitt) has also been a key element in Pop Art, especially the serial portraits by Andy Warhol. The grid relates to the art of Jasper Johns, but also the quilt esthetics have influenced McArthur Binion.
This piece is part of what the artist calls the DNA-Series, referencing his own DNA. At first sight the painting resembles a large grid, but detailed examination teaches us the grid is in fact hiding a collage of pictures representing his parent’s house, a copy of his birth certificate and an old address book.
Modernism as a basic element of abstract art covers the reality of the artist’s DNA, gives it a structure so that minimalism is used as a vehicle for the artist’s personal history including his friendship with jazz musicians John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor (Unit Structures).
Until now McArthur Binion’s work was only bought by American private collectors and museums: the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. It has been revealed to a European public during the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Curator’s selection from G VI collection.
American-Lebanese, born 1925 in Beyrouth.
Untitled
c. 1980
oil on canvas
35 x 45 cm
Etel Adnan is a writer and visual artist, born from a Christian-Greek mother from Izmir and a Syrian muslim father. Her mother tongue thus is Greek and Turkish, and she got her education at a French school. At 24 she also learned English and studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris philosophy. Afterwards she studied at Berkeley and Harvard, teaching philosophy from 1952 until 1978. She returned to Lebanon as a journalist and cultural editor for the French newspaper Al Safa. In 2003 she became "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today". In 1996 she wrote: "Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words, but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression."
Mount Tamalpaïs, near San Francisco, is the mountain she saw during the 23 years out of a window in her studio, the central place of her American life, to which she always returned from her travels to the Middle East and Paris.
“It was the end of the winter when the mountain is green. This series of green pastures, patches of mountain earth, was quite outstanding; they are a harmony of greens, illuminated with only a line of red that uploads the whole composition.”
“I watch its colors: they always astonish me. When it is velvet green, friendly, with clear trails, people and animals are invited to climb, to walk, to breathe. When it is milky white it becomes the Indian goddess it used to be: a huge being with millions of eyes hidden beneath its skin, similar to the image of God I used to have in my childhood days. When it is purple, it radiates.”
Other artists included in collection G VI and on view in the College of Europe