Michael E. Smith / How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken

Michael E. Smith
S.M.A.K. is pleased to present a new solo exhibition with the American artist Michael E. Smith (1977, Detroit, USA), one of the most promising artists of his generation. Using household objects, cadavers and derivatives from our global consumer society, the artist assembles as well as isolates films and objects to seek out their imaginative power all the way through to the boundaries of a semantic deadlock. His predilection for the absurd and for an indefinable tension ensue from a broader critical view of the ecological and economic challenges our society faces. Smith’s work seems to avoid sublimation of any kind and takes in the existing architecture and its fringes by means of an intensive and intimate process of installation in which his works take their final shape. His exhibition at S.M.A.K. presents a set of specially created new work.

In the course of the show, Mousse Publishing will release a comprehensive volume on Michael E. Smith’s work, in collaboration with De Appel, Amsterdam, Kunstverein Hannover and S.M.A.K., Ghent.

From the Collection: How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken
S.M.A.K. has one of the largest collections of contemporary art in Belgium that includes works of art from various movements from the last 50 years. In the open series From the Collection, the museum experiments with proposals and models that show and situate the collection, its history and individual works in various contexts.

In How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken, Wim Lambrecht, artist, curator and head of education at the LUCA School of Arts, Faculty Sint-Lucas Gent, relates work by alumni, teachers and researchers from his institution to the museum collection which, due to its sheer physical proximity, cannot but have affected the school’s curriculum and the formation of its students.

Based on his personal interest for the fragile, ephemeral and temporary character of art, Wim Lambrecht’s selection includes works by Philip Aguirre y Otegui, Nina Canell, Leo Copers, Honoré d'O, Lili Dujourie, Luciano Fabro, Barry Flanagan, Jef Geys, Maarten Herman, Louise Lawler, Kris Martin, Carsten Nicolai, Oksana Pasaiko, Juan Pablo Plazas, Hannelore Van Dyck, Herman Van Ingelgem, Emma Van Roey, Pieter Vermeersch, Henk Visch, Heidi Voet and Cathy Wilkes.