Marcel Broodthaers: The Architect is Absent

Marcel Broodthaers—The Architect is Absent, the third exhibition in CIVA’s Research in Residence program, explores Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’s (1924–76) engagements with architecture, design, and the city, between 1957 and 1967. During this decade, Broodthaers took up journalism and photography, made his first artworks, and established the key orientations for his emerging practice as an artist and writer.

The exhibition pivots around Monument Public nº4 (1963), Broodthaers’s earliest exhibited artwork, which is comprised of egg cartons, a busted plastic sphere, eggshells and plaster eggs, a tin can, cutlery, and a box for a toy space helmet, among other elements. Configured in a precarious fashion and added with paint and plaster, this quixotic assemblage marked the dawn of Broodthaers’s career. This exhibition contextualizes this early work, examining its formal and referential proximity to the urban and architectural frameworks of postwar Brussels. Whereas Broodthaers’s burgeoning art practice is typically codified as a transfer from poetry to art making, The Architect is Absent speculates instead on its close relation to architecture and the built environment.

Drawing on little-known and under-examined documents drawn from CIVA’s collections and other sources, the exhibition argues that the metamorphosis of 1950s Brussels—a shift brought on by the remodeling of the city’s train and road network, which culminated in time for the 1958 World’s Fair—marked Broodthaers’ early formation as a poet, photographer, and writer. From his photographs of Brussels’ modernizing streets, squares, and buildings; to Statues de Bruxelles (1957/1987), a book, made with photographer Julien Coulommier (1922–2014), showing the city’s monuments; to his texts focusing on the city and the World’s Fair, Broodthaers had a deep-seated fascination with the Belgian capital as it showcased the modernization of postwar society. 

The Architect is Absent presents recently discovered articles, published by Broodthaers in 1963, months before he turned to art, which discuss architecture and urban planning, industrial design, art, and fashion, as fields entwined with a wider commercialization and homogenization of postwar society. Moreover, the exhibition suggests that Monument Public nº4 stages the tower as a symbol of such a society, mocking the emptiness of its architecture and erecting a monument to what is lost—that is, materiality, memory, and a genuinely public condition. The Architect is Absent asserts that this early work is a model-like cypher in dialogue with the Centre International Rogier, colloquially known as the Martini Tower, a vibrant, multifunctional high-rise in Brussels to which Broodthaers referred as an emblem of commercialization and “flatness.”

The exhibition also explores Broodthaers’s collaborations with artist-designer Corneille Hannoset (1926–1997) and architects Constantin Brodzki (1924–2021) and Pierre Puttemans (1933–2013). It discerns parallels between Broodthaers’s inscription of objects and assemblages with subjective expression and manual qualities and the comparably expressive, if still functional, view of graphic, industrial, and architectural design by Hannoset and Brodzki. Focusing on the Brussels journal Architecture 52—for which Hannoset acted as graphic designer and Brodzki and Puttemans as correspondents for industrial design and urban planning (and board members from 1963 onwards)—the exhibition signals Broodthaers’s close connection to the debates about functionalism in building and design at the moment when he began his artistic career. Moreover, it speculates on his involvement in the making of an Architecture 52 issue on the demolition of the Maison du Peuple (1896–1965), the seat of the Socialist Party designed by architect Victor Horta (1861–1947), which Puttemans had commissioned Broodthaers to photograph just before its demolition.

Book (forthcoming summer 2025)
The exhibition will be accompanied by an eponymous book, published in the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press , co-funded by the Graham Foundation, and edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen. 

Conference: March 14, 2025, 2pm
Co-organized by Stefaan Vervoort and Joe Scanlan as part of a two-part conference "The Unexamined Marcel Broodthaers" between CIVA Brussels and Princeton University, the program draws upon newly gained knowledge of Broodthaers' beginnings as a visual artist and the development of his career, including hitherto unknown writings and projects and unexamined exchanges with artists, architects, curators, and gallerists. Additionally, this conference will draw on archival discoveries linking Broodthaers to architectural theory, sociology, psychiatry, and critiques of capitalism. Contributors include Koen Brams, Anna Dezeuze, Janna Schoenberger, Dirk Snauwaert, Trevor Stark, and Stefaan Vervoort. The first part of this two-part conference took place at Princeton University in October 2024.

Screening (date to be confirmed)
Among others, the public program will include a screening of Harun Farocki´s In Comparison, a 61-minute film on the production of bricks. The film will be presented by Berlin-based researcher, writer, curator and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut Tom Holert.

About Stefaan Vervoort
Stefaan Vervoort is a postdoctoral researcher and a founding member of the research group KB45 (Art in Belgium since 1945) in the Department of Art History, Musicology, and Theater Studies of Ghent University (UGent). He holds a master’s degree in architecture and engineering from UGent’s Department of Architecture and Urban Planning; an MPhil in visual arts, media, and architecture from Vrije UniversiteitAmsterdam; and a PhD in architecture and engineering from UGent. He previously taught at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Rotterdam’s Academy of Architecture and Urban Design, Antwerp’s College of Art, and LUCA School of Arts, Brussels. In 2023 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. His research, focusing on the exchange of postwar art and architecture and sculpture in postwar Belgium, has been published in books, catalogs, and art and architecture journals.

About the Research in Residence program at CIVA
Research in Residence, CIVA’s collection-based transdisciplinary research initiative founded in 2022, renegotiates the terrain between the hermetic sphere of the archives and their public exposure. After artist Vincent Meessen and architect Anna Puigjaner (MAIO), Stefaan Vervoort is the third researcher invited to develop an exhibition in collaboration with CIVA Collections, Brussels.

Curators: Stefaan Vervoort, Nikolaus Hirsch, Francis Carpentier / Press contact: Anne-Gaëlle Solé, ag.sole@civa.brussels, +32 642 24 87.

The exhibition, book, and conference are generously supported by the Flemish Community Commission, the Brussels Capital Région, and Ghent University’s Societal Valorisation Fund, and the Graham Foundation. The exhibition and book are realised in collaboration with the Estate Marcel Broodthaers, Brussels, Marie-Puck Broodthaers, and Maria Gilissen.