Art at Dok Cafe

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Tribute to Jan Hoet, 8 May 2004

2004 

Marina Abramović

Luc Tuymans

Gönter Förg

Michelangelo Pistoletto

A set of four prints, including two lithographs and two screenprints in colours, one with silver mylar collage, on various papers, the full sheets and with full margins, the sheets loose (as issued) contained in the original card portfolio with fabric-covered corners and spine.

All signed and numbered in pencil or silver ink, published by Vrienden van het S.M.A.K.

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Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović Serbian Марина Абрамовић, born November 30, 1946) is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist, philanthropist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work explores body art, endurance art and feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the “grandmother of performance art”. She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on “confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body”. In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.

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Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans (born 1958 in Mortsel, BE) is a hugely influential Belgian painter currently living and working in Antwerp. He is notorious for his observations of historical and contemporary manifestations of horror. Violence and stillness both underlie his works, which show a readiness to deal with these disturbing issues, continuing the tradition of Belgian artists such as James Ensor or Léon Spillaert, whose work thrived on the strange and the sinister.

Luc Tuymans’ images, which include both banal motifs from everyday life, and explosive historical themes, can be grasped only with a highly focused gaze that goes beyond surface indistinctness. His paintings often depict bleached out images that seem to barely surface, resolving and dissolving before the eye, images that are as much felt as seen. They reveal a superior, enigmatic level of meaning.

Typically inflammatory subjects that Luc Tuymans has explored are the Holocaust and the Ku Klux Klan. Tuymans calls his paintings “immaterial pictures”. Sourcing many of his images from film and photography, Tuymans sees celluloid and paint as equally influential. His use of the formal techniques of photography and film—editing, cropping, and full-page bleeds—promotes an unsettling energy in his work. Tuymans represented Belgium at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.

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Gönter Förg

Günther Förg developed his pared-back conceptual practice as a reaction against the expressive figuration that dominated his native Germany in the 1980s. His works often Fragmentation and Germany’s political climate were major themes throughout his oeuvre. Förg is also well known for his photographs of architecture. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and exhibited in London, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, New York, Milan, and Rome, among other cities. Förg’s work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Museum Ludwig, among others.

German, 1952-2013, Fuessen, Germany, based in Freiburg, Germany

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Michelangelo Pistoletto

A leading figure in the development of Arte Povera and Conceptualism, Michelangelo Pistoletto is best known for his “mirror paintings,” which he first made with grounds of metallic paint on canvas before rejecting canvas altogether, in favor of screen-printing on polished steel. The beguiling results overlay figurative elements on flat, reflective surfaces. This implicates viewers, who look back at themselves while looking at the art. Conceptual themes of representation and interactivity prevail throughout Pistoletto’s oeuvre, also figuring into his early sculptural projects such as his “minus objects,” which explore how everyday items might become art. Pistoletto has participated in many editions of Documenta and the Venice Biennale. In 2003, he won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. His work has sold for seven figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Italian, b. 1933, Biella, Italy, based in Turin, Italy

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Miroslaw Balka

Miroslaw Balka states: “I always try to create difficult questions instead of easy answers.” In his work, which is both hauntingly beautiful and deeply unsettling, he poses serious questions about history specifically that of modern Europe-memory, truth, and perception. Balka uses traditional and unconventional materials in his work, including steel, wood, salt, soap, and felt. References to the history of his own country, and the destruction of its Jewish community during the Holocaust, figure prominently in his work: although Catholic, he has become known as a Holocaust artist. Balka’s video work Bambi (2003) exemplifies the affecting way in which he confronts viewers with the past. The video shows young deer foraging for food in a bleak, snowy landscape, which, as it turns out, is the site of the former Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp.

Polish, b. 1958, Otwock, Poland, based in Otwock, Poland

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