Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens explores how artists use systems and structures to free expression
Colour and language also converge in Alighiero Boettis (1940-1994) arazzi [tapestries], Made during the 1980s and 90s in Peshawar, they reflect the artists abiding interest in Afghan culture.
BRUSSELS
.- Featuring the work of ten artists and spanning a period of forty-five years, Gridscape explores how artists use systems and structures to free expression. The exhibition brings together different generations of artists who have approached one of the defining questions of Modernism: how can systems be used to investigate, contain or liberate the self?
The confrontation between regimentation and chaos, rules and imagination, limits and freedom has given birth to some of the most fascinating artworks of the twentieth century. Taking this as a starting point, Gridscape presents the work of artists who have continued to use and challenge systems as a way of expressing the complex relationships that unite the collective and the individual, or the inner and outside worlds. Grids often represent an attempt to rationalise things that are vast, capricious and almost impossible to control, such as language, memory and time. The latter two concepts come to the fore, for example, in the work of On Kawara (1932-2014) and McArthur Binion (b. 1946). While Binions paintings take the form of grids layered over a substrate of personal photographs, documents and pages from a two-decade old address book, Kawara worked on his Today series for more than fifty years: monochromatic canvases in red, blue, or grey that record the date of their creation. The artist toiled for hours on each piece and always followed a strict protocol. If a date wasnt finished on the same day, it was destroyed. Whereas Kawara sought to arrest a single moment of time in an almost forensic and neutral way, Binion imposes a framework upon a lifetime of vivid memories.