Jan Fabre, Melissa Gordon, and Keren Cytter
June 1–July 3, 2016
Opening: Sunday, May 29, 2:30–6pm
Deweer Gallery
Tiegemstraat 6A
8553 Otegem
Belgium
www.deweergallery.com
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Jan Fabre: Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas
With the exhibition Jan Fabre – Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas (Vanity of vanities, all is vanity), Deweer Gallery presents an exclusive preview of a new series of mosaic works by Belgian artist Jan Fabre. These works will only be shown again in the great exhibition Jan Fabre – Knight of Despair / Warrior of Beauty which will run from October 21, 2016 to April 9, 2017 in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Vanity and fidelity are the two major themes in this new and impressive series of mosaics that have been realized with thousands of iridescent wings of the green jewel beetle. The vanitas motif is a common recurring theme in Jan Fabre’s visual and theatrical oeuvre and it is also not the first time that the artist uses dogs or actors that imitate dogs in his work. In short, it is not surprising that, here again, Fabre makes generous use of these motifs. Fabre, in depicting dogs playing with a skeleton or dogs presenting a clock, portrays his vision of the transience of earthly life in a very penetrating manner: man must commit himself to ideals that transcend the temporal, such as beauty.
Melissa Gordon: The Gesture is a Joke
The Gesture is a Joke is the second solo exhibition of American artist Melissa Gordon (1981) at Deweer Gallery. In this show she presents a series of autonomous, abstract paintings that take as their subject the accidental, aleatory, uncontrolled by-products of the painting process found on the surfaces of Melissa Gordon’s studio. The artist zooms-in on and frames her own gestures, before in a controlled and careful way reproducing them in acrylic on canvas. Gordon creates her own exhibiting construction within the gallery architecture. Temporary walls—themselves a reference to production—underline the artist’s fascination for the unfinished, for the fragment, for being-in-movement.
Displayed together the paintings reveal a photographic relationship to each other, as if seen from the eye of a camera as it pans across a wall. In doing so, The Gesture is a Joke foregrounds a series of important relationships in Gordon’s work: between representation and abstraction, between presence and absence, and between painting and film.
Keren Cytter: Siren
For video artist, filmmaker and writer Keren Cytter (1977) Siren is her second solo show with Deweer Gallery. The exhibition screens three videos: Siren (2014), Rose Garden (2014) and Metamorphosis (2015).
Cytter’s work focuses on relations, or on the impossibility of relations, as well as the impossibility of authentic filmmaking. Her films constantly reflect on their own creation process, they disenchant, show that the “magic light” isn’t all that magical, but rather a construction—just like relations and sexuality…Cytter never does so with grudge or pessimism, but with playful and humoristic gestures that are touching and convincing. Cytter’s stories are based on scripts she writes herself, are being played by friends and are shot by the artist herself, often in the privacy of her own apartment. For her narrative yet radically experimental videos, quickly made and with few resources, Keren Cytter is internationally acclaimed as the artist who constantly innovates and expands the language of the medium.
On the occasion of Cytter’s solo show and in collaboration with Deweer Gallery Art Cinema OFFoff, Ghent, Belgium is screening other (and elder) videos by Keren Cytter, on Monday, May 30, 8pm, in the presence of the artist.
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