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14/9/2005

Two exhibitions

Xavier Hufkens, Bruxelles

On Thursday, 15 September Xavier Hufkens is pleased to introduce the new season with a large, in situ installation by the famous, French artist Daniel Buren. It is a first project by the artist at the gallery. By means of “Des reflets, des éclats et quelques autres choses aussi. Travaux in situ et d’autres situés Septembre 2005 », Daniel Buren will transform the architecture of the gallery. Colour in contrast with the pure white of the walls and a playful interaction with the existing light and architecture are at the basis of his new intervention on the ground floor. As in his most recent in situ installations at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2005) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2004), Buren wants to create a complex ensemble at Xavier Hufkens, one that combines visual intelligence with pleasure and invites the spectator on a spectacular passage through a completely reinvented space.

On the second floor, Xavier Hufkens has invited the English artist Simon Frost (° 1961). For his first exhibition in Brussels, Frost is presenting a series of drawings that date from the last four years, his entire output from that period. Simon Frost’s work almost exclusively consists of drawings. Although his vocabulary is simple and largely abstract, drawn dots or lines, it usually takes the artist months to conclude one of his painstaking, labour intensive works. “Frost draws slowly out of necessity. The gradual accumulation of small marks that lies at the core of his very straightforward method challenges viewers to rethink their relationship to time and the degree to which we actually look and experience art.” (excerpt from John YAU, Simon Frost. Drawing as a way of life, 2005)

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Daniel Buren

Des reflets, des éclats et quelques autres choses aussi
Travaux in situ et d’autres situés

Xavier Hufkens is pleased to announce a first exhibition by the French artist Daniel Buren at the gallery. The exhibition will include older works and an in situ installation.

“Throughout his career Daniel Buren has radically questioned the nature of art and the systems that support and manipulate it. At the same time, he has successfully worked within the institutions that are an integral part of this cultural machine. Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris suburb, in 1938, Buren began painting in the early 1960s and after a short but prolific period of experimentation with this medium, the artist discovered the striped material that would become his signature. By 1965 the artist had begun making paintings with a linen pre-printed with alternating bands of white and colour that he found at the Marché Saint-Pierre, a textiles market in Montmartre, Paris. By reducing his paintings to their simplest visual and physical elements, emptying them of all illusion and subjectivity, Buren questioned the traditional expectations of the form, though he always applied acrylic to the outermost white stripes to differentiate the fabric from a found object. His interest in the literal components of the work, which consisted of both surface and support—the recto and verso—would lead him to explore aspects (both material and ideological) of a work of art that are not visible: what conventional painting, in fact, masks.

The repetitive stripes, 8.7 cm wide (the width of the bands on the original found fabric), became a "visual tool" for Buren that he applied to various supports and with a large range of different materials. What has often been called a reduction, the artist has explained, "is in fact the widening of one's field of vision" that Buren uses to draw attention to the relationship between art and its support or surroundings. At the end of 1967, Buren began pasting pre-printed posters with the vertical bands alongside or over advertisements and bills on supports throughout the urban landscape. This type of work, called Affichage Sauvage, challenged the usual art system and was often made without any invitation or support from a gallery. These works opened up Buren's art to diverse audiences and interpretations and epitomize his interrogation of the museum and the conventional notion of the autonomous work of art…

While the stripes have remained a recognizable element throughout his oeuvre, Buren's work has become more sculptural and architectural in scale and form. Materials associated with traditional painting, including the wooden stretcher and canvas, have morphed into freestanding walls, corridors, and rooms. Adopting these architectural elements into his own vocabulary, Buren began making work that both reflected and mimicked architecture. With his structures, which often merge with and alter the existing architecture, Buren creates "places within existing places" and offers a different perspective on what might be a familiar environment.”
(Excerpts from Susan CROSS, Daniel Buren. Overview, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2005)

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Simon Frost

*A catalogue is published on the occasion of this exhibition*

Simon Frost (° 1961) is a British artist living in New York since the late 1980’s. He has held exhibitions in Great-Britain and the United States. His work exclusively consists of drawings. Although his vocabulary is simple and largely abstract, drawn dots or lines, it usually takes the artist months to conclude one of his painstaking, labour intensive works.

For his first exhibition in Brussels, the artist is showing a series of drawings that date from the last four years, his entire output from that period. The drawings range in size between 13 x 13 cm and 188 x 97 cm.

“The urgency of Frost’s drawings is not in the production, but in the process. He draws slowly out of necessity. The gradual accumulation of small marks that lies at the core of his very straightforward method challenges viewers to rethink their relationship to time and the degree to which we actually look and experience art.”… Rendered on paper and vellum in graphite, gouache, watercolour and ink, the drawings by Frost represent intricate patterns of marks, dots, short lines or abstract signs. “In each drawing, Simon Frost makes the same mark countless times. And yet, no matter how strict the procedure, and no matter how often he inscribes an equivalent line or abstract sign, his repetitions never become dull or mechanical. In fact, just the opposite occurs. We find ourselves riveted by his minutely detailed surfaces, by drawings that appear to be on the brink of disappearing before our eyes. For in making drawings that are as intricate, delicate and structurally tight as a spider web, Frost’s virtuosity consists of making the same small mark or minute gesture fresh each time.”

Frost’s obsessively repeated marks initially seem to form clear, delimited patterns. But, even as they are constructed, they also immediately start to disintegrate. “For all of his devotion to repetition and order, Frost continually courts disruption, disorder, and absence. In doing so, he reminds us that being alive is to be vulnerable to interventions that are unexpected and devastating…”
(Excerpts from John YAU, Simon Frost. Drawing as a way of life, 2005)

Image: Daniel Buren - Peinture acrylique blanche sur tissu rayé blanc et bleu - 1974

Xavier Hufkens,
rue Saint-Georges 6-8,
1050 Brussels

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