CURRENT | UPCOMING | PAST
guy van bossche
the impression of a part of a body with the imprint of another part of the body
4 NOVEMBER - 22 DECEMBER 2011
OPENING: THURSDAY 4 NOVEMBER, 20.00
Guy Van Bossche (born 1952) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. On the basis of existing imagery he comes to personal, painted interpretations of his surrounding reality. In 2002 a retrospective of his work was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MUHKA) in Antwerp, which then travelled to Salamanca, European Cultural Capital.
To the question which artists have influenced his work, Guy Van Bossche answers with a shortlist of Pop Art artists: Ron Kitaj, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton. As a response to abstract expressionism these painters marked a return to representational paintwork. There are indeed quite some resemblances between Van Bossche's work and the canvasses of the Pop Art painters of the 1960s and 1970s, of which the most obvious may be: the subject's choice inspired by 'source material' originating from mass media (television, photographs, films). The reference to popular and mass culture is tenaciously present in Van Bossche's work. He, for instance, gladly turns to the subject of violence, a fascination which is fed by contemporary image culture and the advertisement world. Van Bossche is lyrical about the everyday. His relation to reality is honest, he never deserted her as the measure of all things. But yet, he feels a kind of, as he puts it, discomfort with her. So without de-constructing her Van Bossche's paintings reproach the mass media for not living up to their promise. Van Bossche's criticism lies in the treatment of the subject, in his series and revisions, in the double titles and in the way he uses paint to construct the image.