Work by Emmanuel Van der Meulen

June 26 – July 31, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the first installment of the Brussels, Belgium-based Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art’s (CCNOA) most recent initiative 30/30 – Image Archive Project (IAP).

Conceived by artist and CCNOA Chief Curator/Artistic Director Tilman, the exhibition will feature a diverse group of small works by 9 international artists, including Delphine Deguislage (Belgium), Clemens Hollerer (Austria), Atsuo Hukuda (Japan), Andrew Huston (USA), Camila Oliveira-Fairclough (Brazil/United Kingdom), Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (France), Emmanuel Van der Meulen (France), Jan Maarten Voskuil (The Netherlands), and Lars Wolter (Germany).

With 30/30-IAP, CCNOA seeks to establish a collective collection that will showcase the mesmerizing breadth and depth of approaches reductive artists are currently pursuing on the international level.  The project’s title refers to the size restriction for all works to be included in CCNOA’s emerging registry, which is set at 30 x 30 cm with a maximum depth of 5 cm.  This will enable CCNOA to easily travel the project worldwide (museum in a suitcase).

30/30-IAP is administered by CCNOA in a joint effort with artists CCNOA has collaborated with over  the past 12 years, as well as newly invited artists from around the globe.  CCNOA is currently planning forthcoming 30/30-IAP exhibitions at artist-run venues in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand,  and the United States.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Buzzer #28
Brooklyn, NY 11231
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Rob List in The Figure Series

June 4-27, 2010

Rob List with Melissa Cisneros, Diego Gil, Constance Neuenschwander, Olivia Reschovsky, Tjebbe Roelefs, and David Weber-Krebs

Parker’s Box is delighted to announce a collaborative, interactive, performance project by Amsterdam-based artist, Rob List.

Rob List’s performance work has enjoyed a constant international presence since the early nineteen-eighties despite the fact that his practice has remained particularly difficult to categorize.

The work has often been seen as both primitive and minimal, in that in most of List’s works he actively seeks to avoid the “representation of human experience”, wanting instead to create a “source of it”. With this stated intention, while technically his pieces involve elements or suggestions of minimalist theater, dance and mime, his energy is primarily invested in a reflection on the relationship between forms and the space they inhabit. In this way, Rob List’s performances seek to engage the spectator in a direct experience of the space they are sharing with the performer(s), free of representation or narrative, and concentrating simply on stimulating our awareness of physical presence and the fact that “the world exists because of our perception”.

This dynamic and this involvement between performer and spectator gently persuades the audience to embrace the here and now of their own and the performer(s)’ presence in a given space, without analysis and interpretation of meaning. Rob List encourages the audience to “recall the authenticity and the primacy of this perception” which requires no thoughts of, recourse to, or need for the virtual and digital universes in which we all spend ever-increasing amounts of our time.

Rob List’s work relates to many disciplines, including painting and sculpture, performance, theater, dance and mime as well as certain aspects of film, video, installation etc. In so much art today, the most frequent common ground between such diverse practices would be that “every gesture and action…seems to provoke the question “What does this mean?” Again, this is precisely the area evacuated by List in favor of a pared down relationship with the “real” that may ultimately be closer to certain abstract painting tendencies than to anything that occurs “onstage”.

At Parker’s Box during the month of June, Rob List will be orchestrating a body of ongoing performances, collaborations, research and experiments characteristic of the activities he has pioneered through his company, OZU, and before that in the context of the Institute of New Dramaturgy (Amsterdam) of which he is a founder and former director. Different works will be programmed at different times throughout the project, including performances by request for every viewer who visits the gallery during the afternoon, and daily performances in the evening (starting at 4 and 6PM) and at night (11PM).

For the work On the Balcony, Rob List has invited Mexican performance artist Melissa Cisneros and Hungarian choreographer/dancer Olivia Reschovsky to create solo movement works for the space. Visitors for On the Balcony are led into a specially created room for a five-minute movement performance that occurs just at the periphery of the visitor’s sight.

In two works from the Folly series (playing on the notion of the vain and absurd act/gesture, whether architectural or otherwise), the sober minimal movements of the performers Rob List and Swiss performer, Constance Neuenschwander revolve around a painted ‘folly.’

Suggestions of hybridization or cloning hover over works like Injerto/Greffe (Graft) featuring the Belgian performer, David Weber-Krebs, Dutch mime Tjebbe Roelofs, and the Argentine choreographer/dancer, Diego Gil; or Ter Kloon (on the matter of the clone) with Hungarian choreographer/dancer, Olivia Reschovsky. These works while dealing with fusion and multiplication of course link back into the central question of the individual body and its relationship to time – as a continual falling away of the present moment – and by extension to the fragility and vanity of human experience.

For the final weekend of the project, Rob List will also be presenting two solo works: Natura Morta, and Engrave, which in different ways dwell on notions of life and death, or the insignificance of gesture in the face of eternity – ultimately homing in once again on the status of the individual in the world. Rob List’s ability to simplify and pare down the content of performance art, removing almost all meaning except what ends up being nothing more than Man’s primal musing about his existence, conversely endows his work with incredible sophistication in the face of the contrasting sophistication of the contemporary world. In his own words, he refers to this as “a desire to return to the simplicity and authenticity of the perceptual animal and the perceptual consciousness. In each performance I wish to embody this literally, in a corporal way”.

Rob List is an American-born performance artist, choreographer and teacher who has been based in Europe for the last twenty-five years. In the early 1980’s he toured internationally in the avant-garde theater and film productions of Ping Chong and Meredith Monk, as well as performing his own movement theater work at La Mama and the Kitchen in New York. Rob List is the recipient of many prestigious awards including the 1997 Dutch Theater Directors Award and a 2002 Kunstprijs from the City of Amsterdam for his entire oeuvre. He was a 2004 Fulbright Scholar and a former recipient of an NEA Choreographic Fellowship.

Rob List’s solo shows and those with OZU include performances at Accusé de Réception, Paris, the Kitchen, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He appeared with Ping Chong at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Osaka Festival, with Ellen Fischer at PS122 and Limbo Lounge, and Meredith Monk in the PBS/ZDF film “Ellis Island.” List has created and performed numerous compositions in recent years at theatres, galleries and international festivals in Europe, the USA, and South America.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (America), 1994
Photo: Andrew Cross

January 16 – April 25, 2010

Curated by Elena Filipovic with Danh Vo (at WIELS, Brussels), Carol Bove (at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel), and Tino Sehgal (at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main).

WIELS premieres a major traveling retrospective of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, b. Cuba 1957-1996), one of the most influential artists of his generation. Including both rarely seen and more known paintings, sculptures, photographic works, and public projects, reflecting the full scope of Gonzalez-Torres’ short but prolific career and drawn from the Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres as well as public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, this groundbreaking exhibition proposes an experimental form that is indebted to the artist’s own radical conception of the artwork.

Defying the idea of the exhibition as fixed and the retrospective as totalizing, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form offers instead several exhibition versions, and none the authoritative one, all the better to present the oeuvre of an artist who put fragility, the passage of time, and the questioning of authority at the center of his artwork. At each venue in which the show will be hosted, the exhibition will open to the public and then halfway through its duration, it will be taken down and re-installed by a different invited artist whose practice has been informed by Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Curated by Elena Filipovic, a first version of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form will open to the public at WIELS on January 16, 2010 and, on March 5, 2010, the artist Danh Vo will undo that show and re-install it—adding and removing artworks, changing such things as lighting, labels, and the order of presentation, in other words, effectively making an entirely new version of the exhibition.

Inspired by Gonzalez-Torres’ understanding of the artwork as potentially infinite in meaning and as well as his practice of changing the arrangement of artworks weekly in the case of one exhibition (“Every Week There Is Something Different,” 1991) or, in another, shifting the form and content of an exhibition when it went from one venue to another (“Traveling,” 1994), Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form grounds its approach in Gonzalez-Torres’ very personal understanding not only of the art exhibition, but also of the artwork writ large. The resulting retrospective, initiated and organized by WIELS in collaboration with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, New York, underscores not only the enduring legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ oeuvre, but also several very distinct aspects of his work: from its vulnerability to its concern with formal issues to its scathing social critique, each of these is emphasized in one of the versions of the traveling exhibition.

1 retrospective, 3 venues, 6 versions, 3 artist-curators: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form will offer its visitors the possibility of finding a new interpretation of Gonzalez-Torres’ engaged and complex body of work with each visit. The curatorial interventions of the invited artists—Danh Vo at WIELS, Brussels; Carol Bove at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Tino Sehgal at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main—will emerge from different interpretations of the meanings and presentation possibilities for Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form thus acknowledges that the way an exhibition begins and ends its “story,” the emphasis it places on one aspect more than another, the way it presents individual artworks, the juxtapositions it constructs, the mood it creates (because the works of art are hung sparsely or densely, shown theatrically or in bright institutional light, emphasizing their monumentally or rather their vulnerability, etc.), in addition to the way an exhibition is discursively presented—all of these potentially shift the way that a body of work might be understood by its public. And all of these participate in the construction of the meaning and reception of an oeuvre, which is to say, nothing less than the construction of history.

Catalogue:
 The tour of the exhibition will be followed by a fully illustrated catalogue documenting each version of the exhibition and including essays by Elena Filipovic, Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal as well as interviews with artists of various generations. Essentially a publication determined by the voice of artists, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form will underscore the decisive impact and importance of Gonzalez-Torres’ work on art practices today. Due to appear in 2011.

Bernard Gilcozar, Four palets. Polyptique., 2009
Duct tape and wood, 135 x 90 x 7.5 cm

January 21 – March 7, 2010

September 20 – October 25, 2009

The exhibition project `SUBSTANCE (for Julian)`, at The Suburban, Chicago aims to inform the viewer about two issues addressed as parallel realities of perception – on one hand the notion of a profound play with the qualities of the existing space and simulteanous, the memory of fellow artist Julian Dashper who passed away about six weeks ago and who also exhibited at The Suburban in 2008.

Julian Dashper’s work is speaking to us on a highly conceptual level about abstraction within the perimeters of reductive art-making , yet not to forget the wit and humor underlying his oeuvre. As his passing away coincided with me making plans for the upcoming exhibition at The Suburban, the idea formed to commemorate his influence and strength as an friend, artist and collaborator and to some degree integrate my understanding of his work into this site-specific installation, which at bthe same time reflects on thoughts occurring in my very own work-process; a dialogue, visual and in thought.

This site-specific installation does not intend to comment on Julian Dashper`s achievements, but rather tries to merge with mutual thoughts and shared discussions surrounding the subject of abstract art on various levels, I enjoyed with Julian Dashper and last not least our various points of departure.

The work produced and conceived for The Suburban aims to reflect on the substance of given space . By means of materiality and colour this intervention proposes an interaction of volume and proportion addressing the characteristics of given space.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a sound piece Julian Dashper conceived for the exhibition “2-step,” organized by CCNOA in Brussels in 2003 and an artist book which I will publish on this occasion.

Tilman is an artist and the artistic Director of Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) in Brussels.

June 19 – July 12, 2009

CCNOA presents a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Greet Billet, which will take place in all 3 exhibition rooms of CCNOA. Billet’s exhibition is based on her on-going research project The development of the monochrome in its digital and analogue/graphical form of apparition and will present a large site-specific installation, a new video work as well as a printed edition. The fact that Terence Haggerty’s large site-specific wall paintings in the main space will remain on view during Greet Billet’s exhibition, will provide the public with an excellent opportunity to reflect on the state of digital-based research and its application in the field of non-objective art today.

Clip from Simon Ingram, Random Walk in Brussels, 2009

May 29 – June 14, 2009

Installation view

May 23, 2009 – ongoing

Together
Maike Mei Lan’s latest art installation in public spaces opened in Lommel, Belgium on May 23, 2009. Placed in the heart of town, in a public square surrounded by the village’s most important institutions (church, school and cultural centre), it was essential to capture the
heart of the community and provide a fresh and inviting place to gather and enjoy.

Together is made up of two metal sculptures that are different colors and different shapes, yet work together very well, symbolic of Lommel. The art provides additional inspiration and perspective depending on the time of day, the season, or the position in which you view the work.

Maike Mei Lan also chose to capture the lines of some of the nearby buildings, and did so in a playful way, integrating for example, the shape of a roof or a church window.

VIEWLIST is MINUS SPACE’s new online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Our second viewlist exhibition is conceived by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. Michelle is a Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1997, she co-founded, along with her artist and partner Brad Killam, The Suburban, an artist project space in Oak Park, Illinois. She is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her work is represented by Rocket Gallery, London; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

There are many things in the air and all of them are for free
Conceived by Michelle Grabner

“So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.” — Bruce Sterling, February 2009

Fiscal exigencies have bestowed artists with promising new freedoms. No longer charged with the aim to develop tamped spoils for the voracious speculative collector, many artists are once again examining the formal dimensions of three-dimensional space.

In photography this can be seen in the renewed and enthusiastic interest in abstraction. The exploration of the darkroom’s technical limitations and its structural truths are once again concretizing photography.

The superabundance of ceramics and cast-metal objects weighing on gallery pedestals of the recent years has given way to boundlessness. Untying gravity and provoking physical space is being ushered back into the formalist’s syntax as traditional measures of object value have broken down.

Unlike the contemporary accretion work that engages in synthetic concepts of space, the works included here actively invent spatial relations, experiment with organizing structures and choreographing movement. Accumulation and collection practices — many of which were aptly featured in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibition — are acts of imitation, a superfluous and redundant practice mirroring web navigation and digital information gathering: web 2.0 assemblage.

“There are many things in the air and all of them are for free” is the title of a loopy wire sculpture by Diango Hernández that is currenty on display at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. I have adapted this title for my purposes as it locates value while poetically summoning the progressive fact that three-dimensional space is new again.

Look up.

It is with deep sadness that we post the following letter from our friends at CCNOA in Brussels, Belgium:

Esther Stocker, Abstract thought is a warm puppy, 2008
Installation view at CCNOA, Photo: Sacha Georg

Dear All,

We were informed on 29 April of the final decision taken on 24 April by the Flemish Minister for Culture Bert Anciaux following an opinion from the BBK advisory committee to terminate structural funding for CCNOA as from January 2010.

We remain unconvinced by the reasoning underlying this decision, which will have serious repercussions for our organization, including closure of our facilities, termination of our lease and termination of staff contracts, and we intend to investigate the options open to us.

Over the past ten years CCNOA has become a showcase for discovery, exploration, experimentation, participation and learning, in short an organization that opens eyes, ears and minds. We are proud that our extensive activities in Belgium and elsewhere have provided some 50,000 visitors worldwide with the opportunity to follow new developments in contemporary abstract art and have generated the inspiration for organizations in other countries to open spaces similar to ours. This would not have been possible without the tremendous support of our artists and partners, a large number of art professionals, and of course the general public, over the past decade – very special thanks to you all.

Our current plan is to open an office in Brussels early in 2010 and to continue to work on the international projects (amongst others: With Your Eyes Only @ Medienturm Graz, My Eyes Keep Me in Trouble @ Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA), Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, CAN-Centre D’Art, Neuchatel ) scheduled up to the year 2011. We would appreciate any leads and/or thoughts which might help us secure funding for these and other projects.

We will of course keep you informed of developments on all fronts.

For additional information about our past and current activities, please visit www.ccnoa.org. To post a comment, please visit www.ccnoa.org/forum.

With kind regards,

Petra Bungert & Team CCNOA
Executive Director

CCNOA presents a large site-specific wall painting by British artist Terry Haggerty in the main space. Their program in the multimedia space will present a video work/animation by Piki & Liesbet Vershueren (BE) and their program in the project space will feature site-specific installations by Eric Tillinghast (US/until 24/05) and New Zealand artist Simon Ingram (28/05 – 14/06).

Installation view

Terry Haggerty
Haggerty has become known in recent years for paintings that express the formalist vocabulary of abstraction in a new way. The principle of serial composition can be discerned in Haggerty’s work: light-colored stripes alternate with darker ones to form regular, often horizontal arrangements, which also have a pattern-like quality due to their dense structure. This would not seem particularly remarkable were it not for the fact that Haggerty breaks this linear formation at the edges of the painting — and occasionally also at the symmetrical center of the composition—by bending the lines in a different direction as they approach the boundaries of the painting support. This has a crucial effect on the overall pictorial appearance, in that it immediately transforms the planimetric structure of the painted motif into an illusory perception of three-dimensionality within the image. (Friedrich Meschede) The surface seems to continue beyond the boundaries of the picture support, with the result that the two-dimensional paintings suddenly resemble painted volumes or reflect the illusory perception of a third dimension back onto the pictorial motif. Haggerty’s vibrant wall paintings conjure nostalgic associations from the mustard yellow and avocado décor of the 1960s and 1970s, to optical art, to the precise lines of sugar icing on pastries. He combines humorous and historical references to form abstract compositions that electrify and manipulate the space around them. Biography: Terry Haggerty was born in London in 1970 and lives in New York. He studied at the Southend School of Art, Essex, England, and the Cheltenham School of Art, Cheltenham, England. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kuttner Siebert, Berlin; Grimm Rosenfeld, Munich; Konsortium, Düsseldorf; Aschenbach & Hofland, Amsterdam; and Riva Gallery, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and Artists Space, New York. Haggerty’s work was also included in the Prague Biennale (2003) and the Venice Biennale (1994). This is Haggerty’s first solo exhibition in Belgium.

Installation view

Eric Tillinghast 
After attending art school in Sweden, Eric Tillinghast began his art career in California creating charcoal line drawings that became increasingly geometric as he developed and matured. The precision and carefully developed detail of these early works has carried through in his present work, however, in the form of meticulous execution and careful attention to every aspect of design. Finding that he could explore his ideas about line and space more succinctly with metal, he began making box-like constructions of varying sizes and finishes and engraving them with geometrically ordered lines and patterns. Once engaged with this new material, he felt that he had found his form. These works first appeared as singular objects, but soon he began to create pieces with multiple components, often arranged in a grid. As Tillinghast’s work with steel began to evolve, cylindrical shapes appeared and he began to incorporate water into his pieces. His interest was no longer just with space and line, but also with light and liquid. “Empires” is the latest group of works in color by Eric Tillinghast. All of these paintings are made on small, unfolded cardboard boxes and packaging material. As different as each is from the next, they are all a means to the same end: a man-made container, and yet the shapes and varieties employed to make even the simplest rectangular box are apparently infinite. This series explores these forms and the simple geometry they possess.

Alexandra Dementieva at CCNOA on Vimeo

February 13 – March 8, 2009

Alexandra Dementieva (b. 1960 in Moscow; lives and works in Brussels) studied journalism and fine arts in Moscow and Brussels. Her main interests focus on social psychology and perception and their application in multimedia interactive installations. Her videowork integrates different elements including behavioral psychology, developing narrative using a ’subjective camera’. Her interactive installation projects attempt to widen the mind’s potential for perception using different production materials: computers, video projections, soundtracks, slides, photography, etc. By making certain historical, cultural and political allusions, her exhibition locations create the frame within which the idea develops. The projects explore the spectator’s depths of perceptual experience and the interaction of the individual spectator with the exhibition as well as with other visitors. The subject of an installation or its production method becomes less important to her than the mind of the user. Thus the latter becomes the center of the project or the main actor in the performance.

Alien Space
The installation consists of 800 transparent, pearl-colored latex balloons forming two corridors (each around 3 m long) leading to a central circular space. The balloons are reminiscent of living cells, futuristic buildings, laboratories, children’s rooms at Halloween… The installation generates mixed feelings of curiosity, attraction and repulsion at one and the same time. The shining metallic surface is threatening and the fragility of the thin balloon disturbing. When the visitor moves through the narrow corridor, from time to time he accidentally touches the balloon wall, triggering mumbling noises and an occasional weak light shining from inside. When he reaches the central space, his movements effect changes in the audio and video environment. The closer he approaches the opposite wall, the more it is populated by blurry images and creatures. A few steps further on and he can clearly recognize the creatures – television newsreaders interspersed with images of robots and blurry androids. When the visitor is in the middle of the space all the images and faces are clear and bright (as much as they can be on such a surface) but the sounds become loud and irregular, creating noises that are difficult to bear. If the spectator moves close to the wall, the cacophony of voices decreases, creating a place for one or two images. They stay visible; it is possible to understand what they are talking about and recognize what they are. This piece uses images from news bulletins broadcast by various international television stations. They will be recorded over a period of 2 to 3 weeks. The short films (which were first processed journalistically) will be collected and some of them will be reworked and a new soundtrack created. The sequences are regrouped and combined in a 40-cell navigation system. The installation exposes the visitor to staged virtual life while at the same time placing him physically and emotionally face-to-face with a worrying reality filled with accidents, potential destruction, dramas and love stories…

http://www.alexdementieva.org

Works by Burgoyne Diller

January 23 – March 6, 2009

Featuring artists Matthias Bitzer, Liz Deschenes, Burgoyne Diller, Dan Flavin, Raymond Hains, Yuichi Higashionna , Gregor Hildebrandt, Akira Kanayama, Barbara Kasten, Camilla Low, Sherrie Levine, Kasimir Malevich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anthony Pearson, Florian Pumhosl, R.H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Anselm Reyle, Alexander Rodchenko, Haim Steinbach, Frank Stella & Katja Strunz.

Installation view

January 15 -February 21, 2009

Installation view

December 5, 2008 – January 31, 2009

Curated by Tilman & Jan Maarten Voskuil

Participating Artists: Justin Andrews (AU), Karina Bisch (FR), Krysten Cunningham (US), Ward Denys (BE), Terence Haggerty (UK/US), Clemens Hollerer (AT), Simon Ingram (NZ), Fabian Luyten (BE), Camila Oliveira Fairclough (BR/UK), Jeena Shin (NZ), Morgane Tschiember (FR), Lars Wolter (DE), Carrie Yamaoka (US)

On the occasion of the first Brussels Biennial, CCNOA, in cooperation with Brussels-based artist & curator Tilman and Dutch artist & curator Jan Maarten Voskuil, is pleased to present the exhibition YO, MO’ MODERNISM… as part of the Brussels Biennial Off-Program. The exhibitions will feature the work of 25 artists from Belgium, elsewhere in Europe and abroad who investigate the premises of modernism and question and/or highlight aspects and principles of modernism within contemporary art practice.

The terms ‘modernism’ and ‘modern art’ are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the realism of Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. The term modernism is used to describe the style and theory of art from the 1880s on lasting into the mid-20th century. It commonly applies to those forward-looking artists, architects and designers who self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present, advocated a return to the basic fundamentals of art and subsequently created a new and diverse vocabulary. With the invention of photography, the realistic approach to painting and sculpture became unnecessary, and artists began searching for new ways of visualizing and thinking about the nature, materials, and function of art. Freedom of expression, experimentation, and radicalism became constituent parts of their artistic practice. They believed that art should stem from colour and form and not from depiction of the natural world. But modern art has often also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.

Due to the complexity of the subject as well as the size of our exhibition space, YO, MO’ MODERNISM… will be presented in two parts. While part 1 will focus on contemporary artists whose works explicitly expand on and refer to concepts, conceptions and ideals within the modernist movement, part 2 will present works by artists whose artistic practice is no longer driven by the social or metaphysical utopias of the pioneers of modernism, but have taken a rather extroverted stance towards modernist ideas, exploring and expanding on the subtleties of our daily environment as well as on popular culture and its constituents. Dogmatic and pragmatic statements of the heroes of past decades have been replaced by a playful approach towards art-making and its implications today, and have subsequently led to the exploration of other areas of contemporary culture, like sound, architecture, music, generic materials, video, etc. This has broadened the comprehension and perception of abstract art, its forms, functions and validity, and the perspective on the reciprocal transfer between the material realities of art and life.

October 17 – November 31, 2008

On the occasion of the first Brussels Biennial, CCNOA, in cooperation with Brussels-based artist & curator Tilman and Dutch artist & curator Jan Maarten Voskuil, is pleased to present the exhibition YO, MO’ MODERNISM… as part of the Brussels Biennial Off-Program. The exhibitions will feature the work of 34 artists from Belgium, elsewhere in Europe and abroad who investigate the premises of modernism and question and/or highlight aspects and principles of modernism within contemporary art practice.

Participating artists: John Armleder (CH), Krijn de Koning (NL), Fergus Martin (IR), Gerold Miller (DE), John Nixon (AU), Perry Roberts (UK/BE), Michal Skoda (CZ), Esther Stocker (IT/AT), Gerold Tagwerker (AT), Simon Ungers (DE), Beat Zoderer (CH)

In the Project Space: Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (FR), Julian Dashper (NZ)

In the Multimedia Space, AUSTRIAN ABSTRACTS: dextro (AT), Tina Frank (AT), Karoe Goldt (DE), LIA (AT), Andres Ramirez Gaviria (CO), Michaela Schwentner (AT), Curator / Commissaire Norbert Pfaffenbichler (AT)

September 11 — October 5, 2008

CCNOA presents a new large site-specific installation by Belgian artist Pieter Vermeersch.

September 11 — October 11, 2008

Jacobson Howard Gallery presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Bram Bogart. Bogart was born in 1921 in Delft, and lived variously in Paris, Rome, and Brussels. In the 1960’s he gained Belgium nationality and began what was to be the work that characterized his career. Throughout that career Bogart has been linked to such diverse groups and movements as Abstract Expressionism, Tachism/l’art informele, and Art Concrete. The essence of Bram Bogart’s work lies in texture and composition. A brush, a trowel and a painter’s knife are the instruments used by the artist to make the matter move rhythmically. He works from above, with the canvas, which often weighs several hundred pounds, lying on the floor.

Tilman, House of Colors, 2008

September 4 — October 10, 2008

Image by Ward Denys

August 31 — September 14, 2008

Organized by Billy Gruner (AUS), Tilman (D/B) & Jan van der Ploeg (NL) in cooperation with CCNOA Brussels (B). Participating artists include: Julian Dashper (NZ), Koen Delaere (NL), Ward Denys (B), Sacha Goerg (CH/B), Michelle Grabner (USA), Billy Gruner (AUS), Ro Hagers ((NL), Kyle Jenkins (AUS), Sarah Keigherty (AUS), Andrew Leslie (AUS), Gerold Miller (D), Leopoldine Roux (F/B), Ton Schuttelaar (NL), Ingrid-Maria Sinibaldi (F), Michal Skoda (CZ), John Tallman (USA), Tilman (D/B), Jan van der Ploeg (NL), Machiel van Soest (NL), Pieter Vermeersch (B), Jan Maarten Voskuil (NL) & Lars Wolter (D).

June 21 — September 20, 2008

H29 presents La Vie en Rond, including nearly 50 artists from Belgium, Europe, the US and Australia. Many of the participating artist have long been working exclusively with the formal vocabulary of the round: meander, dot, circle or shere. The media ranges from wall painting, video, photography, sculpture and performance.

June 12-15, 2008

May 24 – June 7, 2008

H29 presented Words Fail Me, a group exhibition featuring artists Steve Karlik, Li-Trincere & Don Voisine. The exhibition was curated by Matthew Deleget, artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE in Brooklyn, New York.

Abstraction has a tenuous relationship with language. It often eludes description. Words Fail Me included three New York City-based painters, each of whom contributed one painting to the exhibition.

Installation view (left to right):
Li-Trincere, Steve Karlik & Don Voisine

Esther Stocker, Was sind das für Dinge, die wir voraussetzen? (Quine), 2005
Site specific installation / wood, 8.5 x 4 x 3.2 m approx.
Installation view at Galerie Krobath Wimmer, Vienna, Photo: W. Woessner

May 9 — June 15, 2008

CCNOA presents the new large site-specific installation entitled Abstract Thought Is A Warm Puppy by Italian artist Esther Stocker in their main space, a retrospective of collaborative works by Alexandra Dementieva (RU/B) & Aernoudt Jacobs (B) in their multimedia space as well as new works by Sacha Goerg (CH/B), Clemens Hollerer (A), Michal Skoda (CZ), and Justin Andrews (AUS) in their project space.

May 3-17, 2008

March 1-15, 2008

February 9-23, 2008

February 15 — April 13, 2008

CCNOA is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by British/American artist John Beech in the main space. The exhibition is comprised of a large sculpture, entitled NOHOW, and 84 works from Beech’s Monument Series Drawings.

Image: Willum Geerts

thru January 27, 2008

A group exhibition curated by Martijn Lucas Smit of Nieuwe Vide (NL) featuring artists Paul Baartmans (A/V-sculpture), Sema Bekirovic (video), Marissa Evers (drawing), Willum Geerts (video), Jannie Regnerus (film), Robbert van der Horst (audio), Jochem van der Spek (video installation) as well as Ward Denys with a functional sculpture.  Also, Tayo Heuser on view in CCNOA’s Project Room.

November 1-31, 2007

The art of Ward Denys (b. 1975, Izegem, Belgium) covers a wide field of media: sculpture, photography and installation. Through a visual language that is quintessentially minimalist, the artist addresses notions of physical and mental experience, topography and memory. In CCNOA Denys has created The complete video exhibition set, an installation comprising a monumental black box and a series of small gadgets (pencils, postcards and tape). The complete video exhibition set constantly shifts the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the natural and the artificial. A window extending towards the exterior of the gallery space assumes the role of a video wall; in the house, facing the gallery, an old super 8 movie of a child is playing. Just as the image is being spatially deferred and in this way is widened and opened up, the anonymous video image with regards to its meaning awaits the interference of the viewer. The complete video exhibition set illustrates Denys’ interest in architecture. It identifies the development stage as the basic site of creativity: the air shafts and the portal of the black box are made, as if temporarily, out of cardboard. The accompanying series of gadgets draw from the same logic. As working tools they play an integral part in this set for video exhibition design.