20.01.2018 - 24.03.2018

20.01.2018 - 24.03.2018

Gazing into Sphere is a site-specific installation by the artist Kimsooja. It recontextualizes the architecture of a former gin distillery and invites visitors to a new spatial experience. Spanning the entire ground surface of the Escher Gallery is a mirror that unfolds and expands the interior void, rendering the architectural envelop as the work itself, within which the audience is embraced. This horizontal plane echoes the memory of the site inscribed in bold circular voids once used to hold malting silos while transcending traces of history into a new corporeal experience. Situated on the ground floor, Encounter – A Mirror Woman is a vertical mirror screen, whose form finds root in traditional oriental screens often used as a canvas for painting. Its folded structure rids oneself of her reflection and redirects the gaze around a visual path that geometrically laces through the reflective surface. The piece stands as a form of painting without the trace of the artist’s hands. Unfolding Sphere, the accompanying sound piece, resonates the sound of clay balls rolling across a surface in different directions, followed by that of the artist gargling water. The rolling sound untangles a spherical geometry into a linear vibration embodying a horizontal trajectory, while the gurgling sound of water alludes to a vertical trajectory of traversing one’s diaphragm. In aural form, the work articulates a psychological geometry orbiting around these two axes. On the second floor is a video work titled Fuego de Aire / Fire of Air. It traces volcanic formations seen through a flashlight at night while moving about the center of Lanzarote Island. As the video captures the shifting distance of landscape in relation to the moving subject, the audience’s gaze oscillates across the depths of horizon. Light becomes a temporal brushstroke – a medium with which undulating visual thresholds illuminate a spherical image of earth born out of fire and air. This piece is part of the artist’s Earth–Water–Fire–Air series conceived around the reciprocal relationship between the four elements of nature. Kimsooja’s work is grounded in her early practice as a painter, whereby the surface of canvas and perpendicular brushstrokes constitute a principal site of inquiry. The use of mirror has become part of her artistic vocabulary since 1999 at the Venice Biennial as a question of surface and an instrument for wrapping and unwrapping space, body, and memory. It extends from the artist’s earlier concept of Bottari, or bundle in Korean, as a three-dimensional painting and a sculpture of life constructed through a single knot. The practice of tying together anonymous people’s clothing inside a used bedcover – a place where we are born, love, suffer, and die – has evolved and dematerialized in the form of a mirror. For Kimsooja, this abstract canvas offers an invisible surface through which we gaze a virtual realm that lies close to reality. Its horizontal form relative to architecture provides a stage for the audience to become active performers in a three-dimensional canvas. Without the artist’s doing or making, Gazing into Sphere unfolds layers of reciprocity, duality, and temporality latent in our visual and metaphysical experience.

Raimund Girke - Dominanz des Lichts Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Raimund Girke (1930 - 2002, Germany), Dominanz des Lichts. This show highlights the final decade of Girke’s oeuvre by focussing on key paintings that are characteristic of the artist’s work between 1989 and 2000. Opening Saturday 20.01 2pm-7pm at Axel Vervoordt Gallery Kanaal.

Last days to visit both Lucia Bru and El Anatsui exhibitions at Axel Vervoordt Gallery Kanaal. Both run until 13.01, the gallery is open Thu-Sat. from 2pm - 5pm.

Sneak preview of the Grand Opening tomorrow evening, Saburo Murakami retrospective in a new gallery space. It's a comprehensive solo exhibition by Saburo Murakami (1925-1996), Japanese painter and pioneer of performance art. The exhibition brings together a large selection of important paintings from the 1950s through the end of the 1960s., featuring works from the artist’s estate alongside generous loans from prominent private collections. Photo ©Laziz Hamani

Dear friends, please join us this afternoon in the launching the Lucia Bru Show at a new gallery space at kanaal

Join us for the opening tomorrow at Axel Vervoordt Gallery Kanaal, A solo exhibition by Lucia Bru called "Rien ne change de forme comme les nuages, si ce n'est les rochers". The exhibition opens at 2pm, in the new Escher space. "Like Japanese gardeners who 'borrow the landscape', Lucia Bru borrows the places in which she works, without constraining them or plying them to her arrangements. They are the supplementary, necessary elements of her passage. She uses them, for a given time, to unleash the unprecedented qualities of the expression of 'things' in which it simply remains for us to participate." extract from the text Joel Benzakin wrote for this occasion (translated by Kate Mayne).

Our latest publication was presented in Hong Kong earlier today: Masatoshi Masanobu. This monograph is published on the occasion of Masatoshi Masanobu’s solo exhibitions at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp and Hong Kong in 2017. It includes many historical images and unpublished biographical materials, found in the artist’s personal archives. The publication gives an overview of Masanobu’s body of work, and features extensive writings by Gutai connoisseur Koichi Kawasaki, art critic and curator Tsukasa Ikegami and Ming Tiampo, professor at Carleton University of Ottawa and co-curator of the exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, USA. This publication, together with the series of exhibitions, aim to contribute to the urgent need for scholarship on this lesser-known Gutai artist. Published by Axel Vervoordt Gallery in collaboration with AsaMer, an imprint of MER. Paper Kunsthalle, this hardcover book is available in English since November 2017, via our website: www.axelvervoordt.com/en/books