On view until 24 April 2022
and until 1 May by appointment

1ST SPACE

duo Nelleke Cloosterman & Alice Vanderschoot - ‘Neon Memories’

2ND SPACE

Stijn Ank - ‘Breathe’

3RD SPACE

duo Manor Grunewald & Sybren Vanoverberghe - ‘Fortune Displays’

Text by Femke Vandenbosch.

With the simultaneous presentation of one solo show and two duets, Barbé Urbain gallery makes the most of their scaled-up space. The exhibitions Neon Memories by Nelleke Cloosterman (1996°) & Alice Vanderschoot (1989°), Breathe by Stijn Ank (1977°) and Fortune Displays by Manor Grunewald (1985°) & Sybren Vanoverberghe (1996°) merge perfectly into one powerful curve. Bathed in saturated white, three diverse worlds each open a universe all their own.

Neon Memories by Nelleke Cloosterman and Alice Vanderschoot unfolds a fresh, contemporary world that simultaneously deviously embraces the past. Indebted to Surrealism and Pop Art techniques, the artists distort and de-contextualize elements from their everyday environment into brightly coloured, seductive works of art. With their shared fascination for references and lost symbolism, they challenge the collective memory. Cloosterman creates nature scenes that, although realistic looking, transcend the laws of logic. In atmospheric compositions packed with fragility and wonder, the artist uses classic vanitas motifs such as bells and butterflies to tell a highly personal story of identity development that can be universally sensed through the veil of mysticism.

Vanderschoot isolates at first glance rather trivial objects and puts them, cocky and dipped in pastel colours, in the spotlight. The artist has an eye for the aesthetic lines of building constructions and translates this into beautiful, architectural supporting structures that contrast tensive with the soft colours and cartoonish, organic shapes. With a deceitful playfulness and naivety, the archetype, myth, and symbolic value of an image are explored. Cloosterman and Vanderschoot appropriate the iconography and the collective aspect of visual language to pierce and transcend them through their own daily reality.

Breathe shows the eponymous new (sculpture) video (installation) by Stijn Ank together with a series of the artists latest sculptures, corresponding and relating to the video. In his own words the work is “inspired by a time where a new virus occupies our breath”, the artist noticed “that people universally responded by looking for places where to find pure oxygen. In letting sculpture reflect on our relation to the world, I reached out to a subjective-fictive place – the possibility of embodying space and time as one.” The artists body of work is a research into the relationship between matter, void, and space. The plaster sculptures with vivid pigmented details are often described as both fragile and robust, delicate, and solid, light as a feather and heavy as lead. For the artist they are not merely sculptures placed in space but 'stances' or 'subjects' that appear out of the space itself. They define themselves based on the relationships with both the viewer and the space and are thus continuously changing.

With Fortune Displays, Manor Grunewald and Sybren Vanoverberghe offer a glimpse into their multimedia, graphically inspired and self-reflective world of personal visual snapshots and technicality. Grunewald archives, scans, edits, and reproduces found images into hybrid, associative compositions where the image becomes self-referential. Presenting his layered resin works with faded objects in trays reminiscent of baths to develop photographs, the artist wittingly refers to the process-oriented nature of his work.

Vanoverberghe shares the love for an intensive and complex process. New mirrored silver prints that zoom in on industrial, desolate places flowed from his artistbook Sandcastles And Rubbish. An air of decay mingles in the black and white images with the gleaming beauty of the detail. Amid garbage, noise, dust and earth, the artist archives and transforms shattered remains into shining trophies to celebrate the glory of the cosmic landscape.

The universes presented naturally illustrate how artists use visual freedom to create a personal world. The difference in time lapse is remarkable in this intimate environment. Cloosterman uses the rigid iconography of the past in combination with colour gradients as a motif to stimulate a flexible, imaginative contemporary storyline. With a club and a beard, Vanderschoot evokes antiquity, but cleverly questions the image of human history at the same time. Ank visits the idea of ​​a world where we can breathe space and time in its entirety. Grunewald blurs time layer by layer into an infinite loop and Vanoverberghe reveals to us the beginning or the end: “before or after the bomb?”, through which time flows in a constant state of flux. Einstein determined that time is relative depending on your frame of reference. Does art have its own time? Maybe the solution can be read in the Magic 8 Ball depicted by Cloosterman: “I have my doubts” and “ask again later”, is painted delicately on the canvas. Perhaps that is the timeframe within the world of the artist, having the time to doubt.

Neon Memories - Breathe - Fortune Display

19/03 - 24/04/2022
From 25/04 - 1/05 open by appointment.

BARBÉ URBAIN
Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent
Thu. - Sun. | 14.00 - 18.00
7/7 by appointment

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Contact us for a preview private visit or a list of works.
📞 +32 (0) 9 391 39 13
✉️ desk@barbe-urbain.com