When post-war art in Western Europe was characterised by happenings and installations, the artist Raimund Girke (1930–2002), born in Heinzendorf (today Poland, then Lower Silesia (Germany)), continued to regard art as a two-dimensional application of paint on canvas or paper. Although he exhibited several times with artists of the ZERO movement, founded by his fellow students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he was determined not to be a part of it. Later, he was associated with some other...

Ricardo Brey (°1955, Havana) is one of the most important artists of our time. His artistic roots lie in the 1970s and 1980s as an active member of the group Volumen I, a landmark in Cuban art history. After extensive travel, Brey receives an invitation from Jan Hoet to participate in Documenta IX in Kassel. Brey moves to Ghent in 1990, where he still lives and works. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim fellowship for installation art and sculpture and the Flemish Visual Arts Prize. Brey has he...

Mercy (Politics) derives from Zlatko Kopljar and Luc Tuymans’ two-person exhibition titled Mercy (December 22-February 23, Galerija Vartai, Vilnius, Lithuania). The book revolves around the politics in the artists’ work, as well as their political views. It consists of an extensive interview with each of the artists and a curatorial statement by Ory Dessau, the editor of the book and the curator of the exhibition mentioned above.

Elsje Dezwartes book Coil is a visual and cerebral reflection of everything and nothing, of how humans experience and live through time. It is about human experience across generations; caught in an infinite time loop. The cadence and rhythm of the images slowly carry the viewer along, as time passes. The reader becomes part of the scene and decides for themselves the direction and sequence of events. Are they looking at the present, the past or the future? The landscapes develop their own ch...

Petrus De Man geniet als schilder en tekenaar faam voor de creatie van een bijzonder poëtisch universum met rauwe, geconstrueerde en vaak erg kleurige accenten. Kind-mannetjes, gevangenen van hun lot maar tevens bezeten van een drang naar vrijheid, zoeken een plaats binnen de beslotenheid van muren en betoverde tuinen, tussen melancholie en schalksheid, in een wereld gecreëerd op hun maat. Aarzelend tussen existentiële bokkensprongen en een soms versteende stilte, evolueert die wereld same...

Candles is a photographic essay by Tim Onderbeke. Fascinated by the sacred, ritual, and cerebral act of lighting a candle, the artist began collecting images of candles and candlesticks in an artistic or art-historical context. In Candles, Onderbeke uses his own work and that of others to research what he calls “the colour of darkness,” or negative space – a concept he borrowed from the Japanese writer and essayist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Tanizaki describes this intense experience he ha...

Spanning fifteen years of artistic practice, this monograph derives its title from a 1913 avant-garde Cubo-Futurist opera celebrating the demise of the sun. It confronts us with the speculative state of reality after the end of the world, a barren ontological wasteland in which artifacts have lost their utility. In his work, Xavier Mary is concerned with the dreams and nightmares of modernity, resulting from its inherently industrial nature. The sense of an impending apocalypse or total destr...

An insatiable hunger for pictorial and formal experimentation fuels the practice and particularly diverse body of work of this artist. Various styles and media are blended in a flamboyant ode to painting – an eruption of composition, color, materials, and sculptural interventions. Belgian artist Narcisse Tordoir (born 1954) challenges the viewer to sharpen their gaze and question the status of the image. For him, that image, and by extension visual art, is a place of wonder and mystery, a g...