calendario eventi  :: 

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24/10/2007

Two exhibitions

Dagmar De Pooter Gallery, Antwerp

Zazah G.Van Den Broeck and Marc Provins

"Atlas" Zazah G. Van den Broeck

Like the figure of the ancient Greek god Atlas, Zazah G. Van den Broeck's work is laden with the weight of the world. In our stead, she delves deeply into the most personal, most universal, sentiments and expresses them unconventionally, using pure pastel pigment and watercolours. Each work springs from an initial astonishment and awe at the feelings, memories and thoughts evoked by fearlessly posing the oft elusive-sounding but essential (and exclusively human) questions of Why are we here? and Where are we going?

While her last series of works investigated the emotional landscape of the human heart, this series (comprising of a textbook and expanded excerpts as assemblages) focuses on the cell - one of the most elemental, yet already extremely complicated living parts of the human body. As a carrier of memories, feelings, thoughts and stories, the cell, often termed 'the building block of life', transforms nutrients into energy: giving us the power to move and be moved physically and emotionally. As an autonomous whole, each cell constitutes a tiny microcosm in constant motion and caught in the natural cycle of death and re-birth. Yet in an almost imperceptible revolution, the power of renewal can turn against itself, leaving the cell to - like an unstoppable lemming - race towards a destructive and terminal end. By laying colour over the written text and the images of cells, Zazah G. Van den Broeck takes the geography of the physical human body and merges it with the sensitive emotional landscape of personal feelings, evoking a more engaging response in the viewer.

Textbooks unambiguously stand in the service of scientific research and in return are often held in Bible-like reverence. Thus, it almost seems sacrilegious that in her most recent work ATLAS,Zazah G. Van den Broeck colours the sterile pages of a biology textbook. Quietly, yet decidedly subversive, she imbues the clinically sterile images with soft hues, turning them back into what they actually are: inner landscapes. From this same book several images of different cells are chosen, printed, cut out, reassembled on large sheets of paper and finally coloured over with a mixture of crayon, pastel, ink and watercolour. Just as the textbook defines the identity of the cell, our own identity is determined by our experiences. Layered, like the pages and information of a book, our experiences and thus our identity is the result of culmination. Like the turn of a page in a book, each successive experience we have, whether complex or simple, will be succeeded by the next in an endless incessant movement. These large works are frozen moments - islands in the complexity of our evolving identity. In Zazah G. Van den Broeck's work colour becomes a medium bleeding from print to paper and blurring the inside-outside border between personal and public experience.

Zazah G. Van den Broeck was born in Belgium and lives and works in Antwerp. She studied at the Royal School of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In 2006, she had her first solo exhibition at Dagmar de Pooter Gallery, Antwerp. It was entitled Memories and the Heart. Text by David Ulrichs, Berlin, September 2007

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"Above" Marc Provins

Above is Marc Provins' second solo exhibition at The Dagmar De Pooter Gallery, following on from In-Between shown as part of Foto Antwerpen in 2005. This exhibition comprises of all new work made over the last two years. In many respects this new work is a direct reaction to the previous, creating a dialogue between the two shows.These are landscape pictures from the edges of towns and cities, from suburban gardens, wastelands, semi-rural parks, coastal scrublands and those bits of the city where the shine has rubbed off. Borders and thresholds, where one thing transitions into another is a repeated theme in Marc Provins' work. There is a constant calming presence in the form of the universal sky. Ever present in the history of art and photography the sky is usually the background but in this work the sky's role is elevated, as it seems to watch over a disharmonious 21st century world.

To the casual observer the images in Above may not look like traditional photographs, however this work has photography at its core. These images are about photography and the process of recording the three-dimensional world around us in two dimensions. How do we see and perceive the world around us? How do we understand space? Where does the self stop and the world around us start? Marc Provins is preoccupied by opposites and the distinction between them; Foreground and background; light and shade; focussed and blurred; real and imagined; the self and the universal; colour and monochrome. There is a constant conversation in these images between these opposing concepts that discuss the still, silent world of the photograph.

There has been a process of stripping back information, reducing a photograph to a more graphic construction - the shapes formed by a brief, fleeting alignment of objects. Photography can be about how the fall of light stirs us emotionally but what if whole areas of a photograph don't react in the predicted way? What if an image contains dead or negative space, no reflected light, no tonal range? These become like artificial shadows or silhouettes and the background becomes the foreground.

Image by Marc Provins

Opening 25 October 2007 6-9 pm

Dagmar De Pooter Gallery
Pourbusstraat 14, Antwerp Belgium
Free Admission

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