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Joris Ghekiere: Journey on Paper

5 July 2022 in Art Comment

oris Ghekiere, Gouache on Mao Zedong poster, 1990–1991

Joris Ghekiere
Journey on Paper
July 2–November 27, 2022

Joris Ghekiere, Gouache on Mao Zedong poster, 1990–1991.

Joris Ghekiere (1955–2016) gained fame and appreciation as a painter. With his thorough study of and experimentation with the possibilities of the medium, he acquired a unique position in the art of painting. What is barely known, however, is that Joris Ghekiere also left an extraordinarily rich body of work on paper. From the early 1980s till shortly before his death, the artist carefully preserved hundreds of sketches, collages, drawings and watercolours in a chest of drawers in his studio. More than 600 works, in various formats, produced with a variety of techniques and created over a period of more than 35 years. Together they form a surprising oeuvre that runs almost parallel to his well-known paintings.

Apart from a few drawings, Joris Ghekiere has never shown this collection publicly. He did not show it to the many curators, critics and artist friends who regularly visited him in his studio, and certainly not to the general public. With the exception of a few close friends, the chest of drawers and this aspect of Ghekiere’s artistic practice remained a well-kept secret for a long time.

Journey on paper examines the years 1990–1991 in which Joris Ghekiere spent a year traveling through Asia. No fewer than 170 autonomous works of art were created during this months-long journey. Mu.ZEE is the first museum to display a large selection of this collection of works on paper.

A cupboard, a chest of drawers, a drawer: repository of memories
A cupboard, a chest of drawers or just a drawer—these are three objects that turn up regularly in Joris Ghekiere’s work. They appear as rather surreal or mysterious elements in the middle of a marsh, a colonnade or on a Japanese travel drawing. Next to a small drawer on one of his drawings, the artist wrote: “Event. Imagining. Intimate relationship between repositories and hiding places. The reality cannot be grasped. It is interwoven with emotions, thinking, you can only evoke them, touch a nerve, touch on the reality, show the repositories where the mind piles up its emotions. Images emerge, take shape, images from the imagination which cannot immediately be localised.”

Joris Ghekiere’s chest of drawers is a repository of memories, a personal archive consisting of experiments carried out in the studio, on the one hand, and from works created during his travels on the other. It gives us an exceptional insight into the artist’s creative process. This collection of works on paper brings us closer to Joris Ghekiere the artist than his paintings on canvas, in which, as he put it so nicely himself, he created little branding for the viewer.

His own studio versus a mobile studio
The works on paper can be divided into two categories. In the first group, works made in the familiar setting of the artist’s own studio, we find, among other things, sketches after old masters, some style exercises and many landscapes. Most striking, however, are the many collages, drawings and experiments, which can often be directly linked to a specific work of art or a thematic series. These works show similarities with the evolution, variation and layering that recur in Joris Ghekiere’s paintings, and therefore provide an insight into the creation process that preceded his works on canvas. In his preliminary studies we see how the artist departs from certain almost banal images and how he works on them by cutting, pasting and using unusual colours, or painting threatening shadows, in order to arrive at a design or starting point for a painting. Experimentation as a preliminary study for a work or a series is a practice we find many artists employ. The resulting creations not only have an artistic, but also an unmistakable documentary value.

A second category consists of works Joris Ghekiere made while travelling. Even as a young man, the artist was a passionate traveller. Just after he finished his studies, he went to Spain for a few months, followed by numerous trips to Turkey, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, China, Russia and India. During his travels, Joris Ghekiere put his thoughts, impressions and reflections on paper, in words and especially in pictures. The sketchbooks and diaries, watercolours and drawings are therefore fascinating pictorial accounts of his travels. These works, which were not made in the intimacy of his own studio, but in environments and contexts that were so important to Joris Ghekiere, tell of his incredible love of travelling and the unknown, and his fascination with the vastness of nature.

In 1988 already, Joris Ghekiere described himself as ‘a desert wanderer with sand in his eyes’. It is an image that the artist would carry with him for the rest of his life and that is applicable to his approach both to travelling and to painting: “My orientation is good, I am a chess player and want to keep an overview and control, yet as an ardent traveller I find lack of orientation much more interesting. Going curiously into strange and unknown territory.”

The year 1990: one year journey on paper
Among his many trips, a long journey through Asia stands out. On 1 August 1990 Joris Ghekiere set off, with his beloved Inge Henneman, for Asia. There they travelled together through the Philippines, China, Pakistan, India, Japan and Thailand. A year later, in 1991, they returned to Belgium. During this months-long trip Ghekiere made at least 170 autonomous works, as well as countless sketches, designs, collages and sketchbooks, sent or brought back with him and carefully preserved. The many impressions from his travels form the core of this exhibition. They show a clear break in style with the mainly dark works that he made as a young man in the 1980s. We can also see the genesis of motifs and patterns which, abstracted or otherwise, return in Ghekiere’s later painting oeuvre. Contrasting colours, surface division, the use of text, as well as motifs like the circle, the funnel, the telescope and perspective lines make their appearance in Ghekiere’s work during this trip.

Joris Ghekiere painted and drew in nature, rented studios, turned hotel rooms into studios and even studied with a renowned miniaturist in Jaipur (India). The impact of the overpowering landscapes on the artist is very noticeable in his creations. We also see an enormous fascination with the form language used by other cultures in their architecture, religion, philosophy and even political propaganda. In China, for example, Joris Ghekiere made a series of paintings on posters of Mao Zedong, in Pakistan he was inspired by the old Baltit Fort in the Hunza Valley, and in Jaipur he became intrigued by a miniature depicting the story of Krishna subduing the water snake Kaliya. Joris Ghekiere processed these and many other impressions into pictures that bear witness to a very formal interest in certain symbols, customs and aesthetics from other cultures. The content and meaning were interesting to the artist, but rather incidental to the achievement of a strong pictorial image.

“1 year journey on paper…drawings and paintings…China India Japan
Walking freely my shadow before me…Hotel rooms. The beach and…were my studio.”

This was how Joris Ghekiere and Inge Henneman announced the very small exhibition that they organised in the artist’s studio in the autumn of 1991. It is still one of the rare moments that Joris Ghekiere showed his works on paper to the public. Some 30 years later, a broad selection of Ghekiere’s travel drawings, 130 from the 170, have been collected in the exhibition at Mu.ZEE. The images have lost nothing of their pictorial power and show a magnificent travel story by a young artist, a desert wanderer with sand in his eyes.

Mu.ZEE

Tags Joris Ghekiere, Mu.ZEE

Renate Bertlmann, Silvia Steinek Galerie, Vienna

26 June 2022 in Art Comment

Renate Bertlmann, Silvia Steinek Galerie, Vienna

Renate Bertlmann
Silvia Steinek Galerie
Vienna

Tags Renate Bertlmann, Silvia Steinek Galerie, Vienna

Gary Simmons, Ghoster #26, 1996

23 June 2022 in Art Comment

Gary Simmons, Ghoster #26, 1996

Gary Simmons (American, b. 1964)
Ghoster #26, 1996
76.2 x 55.9 cm

Tags Gary Simmons

Dumb Type: 2022, Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

30 April 2022 in Art Comment

Dumb Type: 2022, Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Dumb Type
2022
April 23–November 27, 2022

Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Giardini, Venice, Italy

The Japan Pavilion at the 59th International Venice Biennale presents 2022, a new work by Dumb Type, a pioneering art collective engaged primarily in installations, video works, and performances in museums and theaters both in Japan and overseas.

2022
A new work by the artist collective Dumb Type.

“Mirrors on four stands rotate at high speed, reflecting lasers trained on them to project text onto the surrounding walls. The projected texts are all taken from an 1850s geography textbook, posing simple yet universal questions. The sounds of voices reading the texts are emitted from rotating parametric speakers, becoming highly directional beams of sound that travel around the room. In contrast to the discourses that surround it, the center of the room is an empty space—a place that exists nowhere, but at the same time a place that could be anywhere. We live in a time of post truth and liminal spaces. The center is void.” —Dumb Type

About Dumb Type

Founded in 1984, Dumb Type is comprised of artists from diverse backgrounds—visual art, music, video, dance, design, programming and other fields—all contributing to a great variety of stage and installation productions over the years. They have maintained an open-ended creative style with no fixed director and a changing roster of members participating in each new production as part of their on-going exploration of ever new possibilities in artistic collaboration. Since its formation, Dumb Type has worked toward a broadening of the possibilities for artistic expression. Derived from the diversity of its members and from the different media the group uses, Dumb Type’s work ranges across such diverse media as art exhibitions, performances and live music concerts. Their interdisciplinary efforts continue to transcend existing genres of fine art, theater and dance. Regardless of genre, the essence of their work addresses a variety of social issues related to contemporary society, and the today’s technological reality on a global scale.

Their works has been presented in numerous festivals and exhibitions, including the Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York (1994), Hong Kong Arts Festival (1996), Barbican Centre, London (1998), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1999), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999), New National Theatre, Tokyo (2000), Singapore Arts Festival (2002), Venice Biennale (2003), Seoul International Modern Dance Festival (2005), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2007), The Athens Concert Hall (2009), Romaeuropa, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2017), solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2018) and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2019), among others.

The Dumb Type Exhibition at Haus der Kunst Munich will be held from May 6 to September 11, 2022.

Japan Pavilion at the 59th International Venice Biennale

Commissioner: The Japan Foundation
Artist: Dumb Type
Project Members: Shiro Takatani, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ken Furudate, Satoshi Hama, Ryo Shiraki, Marihiko Hara, Hiromasa Tomari, Takuya Minami, Norika Sora, Yoko Takatani and others
Voices: David Sylvian, Maria Takeuchi, Kahimi Karie, Niki
Field recordings*: Yan Jun (Beijing), Crosby Bolani (Cape Town), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Chiang Mai), Kali Malone & Stephen O’Malley (La Tour-de-Peilz), Mukul Patel (London), John Warwicker (Melbourne), Martin Hernandez (Mexico City), Giuseppe La Spada ( Mount Etna), Damian Lentini (Munich), Alec Fellman (New York), Andri Snær Magnason & Kaśka Paluch (Reykjavik), Jaques Morelenbaum (Rio de Janeiro), Atom Heart (Santiago), Cheng Chou (Taipei), Nima Massali (Tehran), Seigen Ono (Tokyo)
*originally recorded for the installation Playback directed by Ryuichi Sakamoto for the Dumb Type Exhibition at Haus der Kunst Munich in 2022

venezia-biennale-japan.jpf.go.jp

Tags Dumb Type, Japan Pavilion, Venice Biennale

Katerina Jebb, Supermarket Chicken, 2020

27 April 2022 in Art Comment

Katerina Jebb, Supermarket Chicken, 2020

Katerina Jebb
Supermarket Chicken, 2020
Digital scan on paper
19.7 x 11.8 inches

Tags Katerina Jebb

David Shrigley, It’s All Your Fault, 2019

27 April 2022 in Art Comment

David Shrigley, It's All Your Fault, 2019

David Shrigley
It’s All Your Fault, 2019

20 Colour Screenprint on Somerset Tub Sized 410gsm Paper
75.00 x 56.00 in
190.5 x 142.2 cm
Edition of 125
Signed by the artist on verso.

David Shrigley is an artist and illustrator best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons. Self-branded as an outsider in the art world, Shrigley is known for making flat compositions that take on the inconsequential, the bizarre, and the disquieting elements of everyday life. Like the musings of a very wise child displaying the wit and humor of a seasoned observer of the adult world, his illustrations feature crossed-out words, scribbled, uneven lines, and darkly funny aphorisms about the world.

In recent years, Shrigley has expanded his practice to include filmmaking. He directed the video for indie-king Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s song Agnes, Queen of Sorrow and co-directed an animated film with award-winning director Chris Shepherd based on Shrigley’s book Who I Am and What I Want. A weekly contributor of cartoons to the Guardian Weekend magazine, he released his first spoken-word album Shrigley Forced to Speak With Others in 2006, which was followed by a double-CD of artists, including David Byrne, Islands, and Grizzly Bear, who put Shrigley’s book Worried Noodles to music.

Shrigley’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2013, he was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize for his solo show David Shrigley: Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery in London.

David Shrigley on His Funny Way of Making Art

Tags David Shrigley

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