John Baldessari / Koen van den Broek
‘This an Example of That’
Release of the book
“This an Example of That”
Exhibition at the Bonnefantenmuseum
Maastricht – The Netherlands
Until January 25th 2009
The bkSM (beeldende kunst Strombeek/Mechelen) publication of the artist book ‘This an Example of That’, designed by Luc Derycke, shows the preliminary sketches of this unique series of works created by the collaboration between John Baldessari and Koen Van den Broek.
Exhibitions International distributes the book.
John Baldessari (National City, California, 1931) lives and works in Santa Monica. His photographic works undermine the conventional language of images. Drawing on visual material from the cinema, newspapers and movie stills, he has described his photomontages as “blasted allegories,” shards and fragments of possible meanings that lend themselves to on-the-spot interpretation. Rooted in conceptual art, Baldessari’s practice continues to evince the artist’s interest in the relationship between image and language, in absurdity, banality, and in Freudian associations. In his work, atrocious images incite laughter, and triteness takes on a tragic dimension.
Koen van den Broek (Belgium 1973) is a young Belgian painter, who lives and works in Schilde, Belgium. His paintings want to examine our experience of landscape, from close-up views of bleak urban corners to huge, empty swathes of countryside. The paintings combine sensual abstraction with precise figuration to create paintings of arresting, cinematic power.
Koen van den Broek has long been familiar with the work of the American artist John Baldessari, whose artistic output has been of seminal importance for the younger generation of artists because in his sustained personal interpretation of conceptual art he has never renounced the making of images.
‘This an Example of That’ is a unique collaboration between these two artists.
For this project John Baldessari sent Koen Van den Broek from his copious archive a series of photographs of scenery and sets from the Hollywood film world. Koen van den Broek conceived and processed this series of 22 suggestive images – blown up in prints ranging in size from small to monumental – with brightly coloured passages, strokes and stripes with the result that a new reading reorients and accentuates the work.
With the respect to content these works aim to occupy a position somewhere between photographic recognition and pictorial abstraction.
This collaboration, in which both artists have retained their artistic autonomy, puts forward a conceptual and aesthetic question on the meaning and the shifts of meaning of archive pictures that as soon as they are pictorially ‘layered’ turn the relevance of their registration into art. By subsequently conceiving of titles for the ‘new’ works John Baldessari has mentally appropriated them back.
One part of the exhibition was shown at the Greta Meert Gallery in Brussels (Belgium) from 14/10 until 22/11 2008. The second part of the exhibition ‘This an Example of That’ opened at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (The Netherlands) the 7th of October 2008 and runs until the 25th of January 2009.
Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht
Avenue Ceramique 250
NL-6221 KX Maastricht The Netherlands
Galerie Greta Meert
Vaartstraat 13 rue du Canal B-1000 Brussels Belgium
The book This an Example of That – John Baldessari-Koen van den Broek
can be ordered at www.exhibitionsinternational.be
