Angus Fairhurst
21 May – 12 September 2010
Philippe Van Snick
21 May – 29 August 2010
L. Vanderkelenstraat 28
3000 Leuven
Belgium
m [at] leuven.be
Angus Fairhurst
M presents the first selected retrospective exhibition of artist Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) in Belgium. One of the most influential members of the group of artists associated with London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Fairhurst participated in the seminal exhibition, Freeze, in 1988, which introduced the world to a generation who became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), setting the tone for contemporary art in the UK over the next two decades.
This exhibition will feature examples from across his full body of work, which defied categorisation through its sheer breadth of media and invention: painting, performance, animation, photography, video, sculpture, music, print, wallpaper, drawing, collage. In contrast to the brash shock tactics of many of his contemporaries, Angus Fairhurst was an artist whose work was always a subtle combination of conceptual rigour and formal aesthetic concerns. His intriguing output cannot be placed in a single category or seen from a single perspective. Moreover, the artist often approached his work with a ready, self-parodying wit. Over twenty years, he revisited and reworked different strands of ideas, often to the extent that one set of works might appear to have little or no formal properties in common with any other. His work touches on subjects as varied as the nature of the self, desire, sex and death, the emptiness of expression, and the ubiquity and power of advertising, but always underscored with a particular sense of the absurd, softened by his singular brand of humour.
Angus Fairhurst is an Arnolfini exhibition curated by Tom Trevor, Director of Arnolfini, and organised in collaboration with M, The Estate of Angus Fairhurst and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Philippe Van Snick
The solo exhibition on the Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick (°1946) includes works from his early period as well as recent examples, both new creations and large space-filling compositions. His extensive body of work is presented by means of carefully selected works produced over a period of more than forty years. The exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the artist’s ‘sober’ artistic production that is closely linked to minimal and conceptual art.
The forms, objects and colours Philippe Van Snick uses in his oeuvre never stand alone; they always relate to the space and include the viewer’s physical experience of the work. By using a simple and restricted formal vocabulary – always imbued with a desire for order –, Van Snick endeavours to describe the essence of life. His work is a mixture of conceptual photography, mathematics, fragile sculptures and colour.
Everyday experiences are a major source of inspiration with the theme of day and night triggering a particularly large number of works. The rhythm of light and dark, active and passive and the subconscious versus the conscious, are other closely linked themes. For Van Snick painting is not confined to the painted surface. It is a study of the relationship of the work to the space it is in and of the individual viewer’s experience of that work. His paintings, drawings, photographs, slides and installations examine, analyze and create space by means of a minimal artistic idiom. The space, the image, the looking, the viewer and the interpretation of all these details are central to his work. For M, Van Snick creates a new colourful intervention, Spheres.
Curator: Luk Lambrecht. Exhibtition supported by IVOK, de Vlaamse Overheid and Provincie Vlaams Brabant.
