calendario eventi  :: 

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23/2/2005

Two exhibitions

Xavier Hufkens, Bruxelles

Hiroshi Sugimoto – Louise Bourgeois

Xavier Hufkens Gallery will reserve its largest exhibition room for one singular but extraordinary work: North Pacific Ocean – Okuros (2002), a wall filling meditative seascape in several parts by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Since 1980, Hiroshi Sugimoto has travelled to remote seaside cliffs around the world to make black and white, minimal images of seascapes. Avoiding dramatic weather and human incident, he focused instead on the meeting of sea and sky. Shorn of any distracting details, the sea panorama looks more like an abstract painting than a photograph. Like the other seascapes North Pacific Ocean – Okuros is part of Sugimoto’s preoccupation with time and its passage. Its intent is not to record an instant but a duration, of minutes or even hours. In this sense, the seascape becomes a powerful object of contemplation and spirituality. It makes us literally stand still and stare until our self-consciousness ultimately dissolves and we lose ourselves in the slow-motion of pure vision.

In the adherent wing of the gallery, Louise Bourgeois will present a selection of editions on paper. During her 70-year career, Bourgeois has produced an extremely rich and varied oeuvre of editions on paper, made up of more than 800 works including woodprints, engravings, drypoints, etchings, as well as screenprints, aquatints and lithographs. Although she is known for the boldness and physicality of her sculpture, the graphic work of Bourgeois reveals a masterful ability to command emotions with the most modest means. Like in other work, the artist uses the print technique to explore issues connected to autobiographical experiences: betrayal, familial relationships, sexuality, motherhood, abandonment and independence, control and the loss of control.

Three recent portfolios will take an important place in the exhibition at Xavier Hufkens: “Topiary. The Art of Improving Nature” (1998): a suite of 9 copperplate etchings, in which Louise Bourgeois suggests expressive and provocative overlapping relationships between natural vegetation and human anatomical structures; “Laws of Nature” (2003): 5 prints about the love between a couple and “La réparation” (2003), a portfolio of 7 prints which deals with the recurrent themes dear to Bourgeois.

In the image: Hiroshi Sugimoto, North Pacific Ocean, Mt. Tamalpais, 1994 (B/W photograph).

You are kindly invited to the opening on Thursday, 24 February, from 6 to 9 pm.

Xavier Hufkens - rue Saint-Georges 6-8 - Bruxelles

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