Borremans
Borremans
Borremans
2014
Michal Borremans
As sweet as it gets
Visitors guide EN
1 - Free for BOZARfriends
Free downloable on www.bozar.be
Michal Borremans
As sweet as it gets
Tickets: 12 - 10 (BOZARfriends)
Visitors guide: 1 (Free for BOZARfriends)
Free downloadable on www.bozar.be
The Branch, 2003, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp Peter Cox
Michal Borremans: As sweet as it gets is the most comprehensive survey of this critically
acclaimed artist to appear in his home country, and the first major exhibition of his work
to travel to the United States and Israel. Comprising roughly 100 works on paper, paintings, and films created over the past twenty years, this compelling exhibition provides
unique insight into Michal Borremans evolving artistic practice by exploring the broad
themes and visual references that Borremans brings to play in creating his psychologically
charged, if strangely ambiguous, image world.
Since the late 1990s, when he first began to exhibit his drawings and paintings, Michal
Borremans (born 1963, Geraardsbergen; works and lives in Ghent) has created an im
probably mature body of work that quickly captured international attention. Originally
trained in the art of engraving, for a number of years Borremans taught and practiced etching and drawing. Always a draughtsman, it was not until the late 1990s that he began to
produce drawings independently. Alternately humorous and dark, riddled with hallucinatory symbols and odd signifiers, these works embrace a rich legacy of artistic progenitors,
but are anchored firmly in the present.
Particularly in his drawings, Borremans figures are sometimes struck silent or blinded,
their individuality negated. While these images are occasionally cruel, they often circum
vent a simple association with violence through the sheer beauty of their execution.
Borremans figures reside in unknown states and locations that convey an indefinable
sense of time and place. In this way, the work is saturated by the surrealist propensity to
evade logical associations, a trait he shares with countrymen including James Ensor, Ren
Magritte, and Marcel Broodthaers.
In recent years and with increasing facility, Borremans has made painting his most imaginative stage. Suggestively channeling precursors that range from Velzquez to Goya,
Borremans has consciously and deftly engaged such visual analogues to embrace paintingand painthistorically as well as materially. Intentionally subverting the mediums
alleged inability to portray movement, Borremans has perfected a style that exploits not
only the transcendent potential of paint, but its deterministic, illusory qualities as well.
Borremans interest in photography and film no doubt inform his technique, and film
both as a source of inspiration and a compositional structurehas exerted a strong influence on Borremans practice. Whereas in his earliest paintings he often proceeded
by painting from found photographs and film stills, since the mid-2000s Borremans has
staged and photographed all the scenarios he then translates into his paintings. At the
same time, he has matured into a filmmaker creating moving images of painterly beauty.
Bringing together for the first time the most complete survey of the artists work in
drawing, painting, and film, As sweet as it gets reveals Michal Borremans compelling
approach to creating powerful tableaux of indeterminacy in all media. Following its
premiere at BOZAR, this exhibition travels to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the
Dallas Museum of Art.
The Avoider
remain a foundation of his oeuvre and he
continues to produce the modestly-sized
paintings that first brought him notoriety,
a pronounced expansiveness has informed
his painting practice in recent years.
This propensity for creating paintings on
not just a cinematic scale, but on an operatic level, was first expressed in a body of
work from 2005, and The Avoider, 2006
was the first painting of massive scale. It is
also part of the first body of work for which
Borremans staged every scenario he painted, recruiting friends to pose and model
for photographs he took and then used to
inspire his paintings. As such, The Avoider
marks a doubly important departure, a virtuoso portrait that announces its intention
to stand alongside the greatest portrait
painters in history.
Measuring over 12 feet, or nearly four meters in height, this beautifully ambiguous
figure, whom Borremans once described as
Christ-like, assumes any number of roles
in the viewers mind. The figure embodies
dichotomous signals: his comportment
is at once haughty (the gaze) and humble
(the dirty, bare feet); and he is at once a
flneur of the citynote his pink shirt
and jaunty scarfand a shepherd of the
country, surveying the field as he grasps
his walking stick. That his pose is a virtual quotation of the figure in Courbets
The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet,
1854, is without question, but the painting
also channels the stature of Manets great
figures and Sargents society portraits. As
in all Borremans work, a fascinating multiplicity of associations ripples through the
painting. For instance, the clearly-present
pentimento of an earlier staff and the haunting shadows that form an aura around the
figure echo the artists interest in cinema,
and indeed, recall the photographic works
of Gerhard Richter.
The Figure
or averted. As Borremans explains, the direct gaze is not suitable. Then [the painting] becomes a portrait. Portraiture has
historically been used to confer authenticity, originality, and uniqueness upon its
subject, but this is actually the opposite of
Borremans intention. Likening the figures
that populate his paintings to living objects
lacking a conscious physical or metaphoric
grip on their circumstances, Borremans
sees them as absent actors who factor in a
parallel dimension outside their control.
In painting, Borremans generally portrays
figures in isolation, depicting images of sentient subjects as disengaged or deadly objects and soulless porcelain figures with the
finesse of a fine-portrait, as in The Visitor,
2013 (not in the exhibition), a conflation
of reality and illusion. Perhaps ironically,
as his paintings have focused increasingly
upon tropes of artifice and performance,
the presence of live actors as the source of
his characters has increased the sense of
reality and verisimilitude that many viewers perceive in his work, which Borremans
would declare is not at all intended.
Still Life
place holder for another intention that
cannot easily be manifested physically. A
watershed in the crystallization of this type
of thinking was Borremans painting The
Performance, 2004 (not in the exhibition).
The Performance is silent and active, anthropomorphic and minimal, sentient and
mute. Simultaneously a model, a still life,
and a subject, it is also a metonymic stage
upon which the painting performs itself.
This painting realized a new plateau of suggestiveness in the way an otherwise inert
objecta still lifecould imply dynamic,
psychological potential. Even so, this still
life was not a painting from life, but rather the simulacrum of a photograph that
Borremans took of the draped table. More
recently, the meaning of representing a still
life has become complicated in Borremans
oeuvre. In 2013 he painted Dead Chicken,
a small but extremely potent image that
was in fact, painted from lifeor in this
case, deathas Borremans worked directly from the object, rather than an image of
it. Although Borremans has always maintained that he paints Culture, not Nature,
in this one recent instance he contradicted
himself, to highly productive ends.
Mortality
Borremans has mined this tension in a
body of work that seems to imagine figures
(individuals) not only as subjugate supplicants coaxed into positions of sublimation, but as hovering in the space between
life and death.
A key example is found in the figure depicted in The Load, 2008. This character in a costume-like cap is deliberately
ambiguous; whether it is male or female,
child or adult, is difficult to determine, and
beside the point. Thrown into high relief,
the figures indeterminate shadow suggests both a sleepinglivingcharacter,
and a hangingdeadfigure. In a related
manner, any number of Borremans paintings suggests a simultaneous dissolution of
recognizable space and an intentional disassociation with the human figure.
The Spiritual
in almost metaphysical terms, describing
speaking to the Virgin and also talking to
his brushes while painting in the chapel.
Borremans felt the effect of that space
profoundly, and it is manifested clearly in
the work he produced there. Three paintings not only possess names that associate
them directly with religious dogmaThe
Angel, The Virgin (not in the exhibition),
and The Son, all 2013the figures (or subjects) depicted in each painting portray
actions that underscore their association
with the Church. The Angel is an almost
shocking image of a beautiful androgynous
creature in a flowing pink dress, a towering figure painting almost 10 feet, or 3.12
meters, in height. This angel, however,
has no wings, nor does it seem particularly
celestial or benevolent. Instead, the black
make-up concealing its already partially
obscured face suggests nothing less than
an Angel of Death.
The Stage
painting may elicit the sense of the disturbing and the grotesque. Yet, while all these
qualities are present in The Devils Dress, the
imagea nude, supine figure wears a red
cardboard box around the torsodoes not
express aggression, but rather submission,
or the absolute lack of any threat.
Typical of Borremans, any sign of disturbance or clues to time and place are omitted from the picture plane. In all his work,
Borremans often pays detailed attention
to clothes and textiles; indeed, fabric folds
sometimes appear like visual representations of convoluted mental states and the
clothes, themselves, seem to transform
their wearers into sculptural forms which in
this work, leads one to focus on the dress.
In The Devils Dress, we are left to ponder:
what is this scene, who is this actor, and
what is its meaning? Perhaps the devils red
dress is nothing more than a red herring, a
device the artist uses to distract the viewer
from realizing that the true subject of the
work is, in fact, nowhere to be found.
The Storm
chilling and accurate for an artist like
Borremans who professes no interest in
seeing his objects as subjects.
Especially in film, but also through the
act of painting, Borremans is actively
transformingenacting the transmutation ofhis subjects into a state of object-hood. This action also infers a state of
transference, both in the physical sense of
the term (touching), and the psychological
element it suggests
Drawing
with drama, wit, and occasionally, anarchy. At the same time, Borremans deftly
undercuts the illustrative didacticism that
the precision of his drawings might suggest, with his bracing formula for mischievous humor bound with withering critique.
Subverting form through the omission or
distortion of connective tissue, Borremans
often informs his work with humorous,
social-political commentary aimed at the
collective indifference of contemporary society, negotiating a passionate if detached
form of analysis of the political and cultural
landscape, one that he feels takes pride in
acts of indifference.
Particularly in his drawings, with their allusions to theatrical tableaux, stage sets,
sculptural plinths, official monuments,
and film projections, Borremans uses shifting levels of unreality, furthered by radical
shifts in scale, to create impossible conflations of illogical relationships. A Mannerist
as well as Surrealist sensibility often informs
these images, with their historic allusions
to Roman portrait busts and other types
of memorial sculpture. As examples in this
and the following room make clear, drawing plays a serial function in Borremans
oeuvre as well. In different ways, a drawing
may inform a painting, which then informs
the development of a film, that in turn, may
form the basis for another drawing or a
painting. Nonetheless, this is a generative
process and drawings, per se, are never simply studies for the paintings or films that
Borremans produces.
Film
a series that now includes 19 works in all
media, a large number of which are included in the final gallery of this exhibition. The
Journey (Lower Tatra) is likewise part of a
series that includes at least six other articulations of the theme. It is easy to relate the
physical structure of these ongoing images
to the sequential nature of film stills, individually isolated from the connecting reel
of the moving image.
Three other works from 2002 included in
this exhibition, the painting The German I,
and the drawings The Walk and Drawing,
are part of larger series of interrelated
works that also include a film: respectively these are The German, 20042007, Add
and Remove, 2007 and Weight, 2005, on
view in this and the following gallery. The
two other films included in this exhibition
and seen in this and the previous gallery,
The Storm, 2006, and Taking Turns, 2009,
also relate to larger bodies of drawing and
sculpture. For the latter work, the drawing Automat, 2008, and three paintings
from 2008, Automat (1), Automat (2), and
Automat (IV), could almost be seen as preparatory studies, though each also shares
an affinity with earlier paintings, including
A2, 2004.
Throughout his oeuvre, and his experiments in all media, interlocking narrative
and serial imagery have always been critical
compositional strategies for Borremans.
The unusual angles, close-ups, subdued palette, and secluded figures Borremans uses
to compose his paintings may heighten a
sense of the fragmentary or incomplete,
creating a feeling of discomfort and unease,
but they also connect logically to the visual
language of film.
In 2002 Borremans executed a number of
works, each of which mark the first in a
series of interrelated images that he would
revisit time and again in drawing, painting,
and film. These include The Prospect, The
Journey (Lower Tatra), The German I, and
The Walk, included in this and the next gallery. The Prospect marked the first appearance of the structure that also came to be
known as The House of Opportunity,
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The Wind, 2011, Oil on canvas, 42.5 36.4 cm, Private collection
Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp and David Zwirner, New York/London
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Combitickets
Borremans
Zurbarn
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Borremans
+ Zurbarn
+ Nautilus
16 (BOZARfriends)
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Nautilus
ZURBARN
NAVIGATING
GREECE
Clay rhyton (ritual vessel) from the Palace of Phaistos, 1500-1450 B.C., Archaeological Museum of Herakleion, Courtesy: Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, General Directorate of Antiquities
and Cultural Heritage, Archaeological Museum of Herakleion & Yiorgis Yerolymbos, Oitylo Manis, 2012. From the Mare Liberum series. Courtesy of the artist.
V.u. | E.r. Paul Dujardin, rue Ravensteinstraat 23 - 1000 Bruxelles | Brussel - Exempt de timbre | Vrij van zegel, art.187
Saint Casilda, c 1630-35, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza - V.u. | E.r. Paul Dujardin, rue Ravensteinstraat 23 - 1000 Brussel | Bruxelles | - Vrij van zegel | Exempt de timbre |, art.187
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21 (BOZARfriends)
12/31/13 10:33 AM
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1/21/14 6:01 PM
The headline event is an exhibition entitled Nautilus. Navigating Greece, which examines the intimate relationship between
the Greeks and the Mediterranean Sea
trough the ages. With the sea as connecting thread, the exhibition highlights the
interplay between nature, culture, identity,
adventure, politics, religion and most of
all mobility in all its forms (immigration,
travel, trade etc). The exhibition includes
almost 100 ancient artefacts (bronze and
marble sculptures, frescoes, coins, vases
and ceramic vessels) from more than 30
Greek museums. Furthermore, within the
exhibition space, Antiquity converses with
contemporary art, involving 23 works including photographs, paintings, and video
art.
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As sweet as it gets
M i c h a l B or r e M a n s
As sweet as it gets
Somewhere in the world of Rembrandt and Hopper, I feel this is where Michal Borremans paintings
are conjured. Such a skilled painter he is who creates paintings which are far more than the sum of
the parts. There is in his work the magic to make us dream. The Angel, for example, which is so
beautifully painted, brings out to the viewer such a dream. Thoughts and questions begin to erupt like
electrical sparks kicking in words like sadness unity diversity the time that we live in the mixing
of cultures, peoples, ages and sexes.
M i c h a l B or r e M a n s
And throughout, soaring out through this painting, a feeling f selflessly taking on burdens love and
are conjured. Such a skilled painter he is who creates paintings which are far more than the sum of
the parts. There is in his work the magic to make us dream. The Angel, for example, which is so
beautifully painted, brings out to the viewer such a dream. Thoughts and questions begin to erupt like
Catalogue
On the occasion of the exhibition, BOZAR BOOKS, DMA and Hatje Cantz are publishing a lavishly illustrated catalogue, with an essay of Jeffrey Grove, and interview
with Michal Borremans and contributions by Michal Amy, Hephzibah Anderson,
Ziba Ardalan, David Balzer, Stefan Beyst, Maria Rus Bojan, David Carrier, Hans D.
Christ, Thomas Claus, David Coggins, Ann Demeester, Josse De Pauw, Marc Didden,
Iris Dressler, Gary Garrels, Martin Germann, Pascal Gielen, Katerina Gregos, Thomas
Gunzig, Anita Haldemann, Renko Heuer, Jennifer Higgie, Jan Hoet, Jens Hoffmann,
Dora Imhof, Ahuva Israel, Maaretta Jaukkuri, Kristin M. Jones, Jeffrey Kastner, Caroline
Lamarche, Jef Lambrecht, Luk Lambrecht, Jeroen Laureyns, David Lynch, Frank Maes,
Hans Martens, Charlotte Mullins, Patrick T. Murphy, Mauro Pawlowski, Magnus af
Petersens, Raphael Pirenne, Hans Rudolf Reust, Peter Richter, Dieter Roelstraete,
Pierre-Olivier Rollin, Lauren Ross, Delfim Sardo, Richard Shiff, Reto Thring, Katya
Tylevich, Stef Van Bellingen, Philippe Van Cauteren, David Van Reybrouck, Mirjam
Varadinis, Roger White, Eva Wittocx, Lisa Zeitz, Joost Zwagerman
Michal Borremans: As sweet as it gets
49 44 (BOZARfriends), 304 p. 3 versions FR, NL & EN BOZAR BOOKS, DMA
& Hatje Cantz)
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Management Team
Chief Executive Officer & Artistic Director: Paul Dujardin
Deputy Artistic Director: Adinda Van Geystelen
Deputy Director Exhibitions: Sophie Lauwers
Director Music: Ulrich Hauschild
Head of Cinema: Juliette Duret
Director Technics, IT, Investments, Safety & Security: Stphane Vanreppelen
Director Marketing & Communication: Filip Stuer
Director Human Resources: Marleen Spileers
Director Finances: Jrmie Leroy
Director General Administration: Didier Verboomen
VISITORS GUIDE
Texts: Jeffrey Grove
Final Editing: Gunther De Wit, Ann Flas
Layout: Olivier Rouxhet, Analle Vanden Bemden
Cover: Michal Borremans, The Angel (detail), 2013, Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
Dirk Pauwels
Paper offered by Paperlinx
Cover printed on Hello 170g - Inside pages on Hello 135g
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