KMSKB is heading for summer with two new exhibitions | Brussels
BrusselsTwo new exhibitions have been presented at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. In honor of his centenary, the retrospective exhibition ‘Christian Dotremont, Painter-writer’ highlights the work of the Belgian modern artist. there is a special focus exhibition on the masterpiece ‘The Murder of Marat’ by Jacques Louis-David. Both expos run from April 28 to August 7.
Christian Dotremont (1922-1979) is one of the founders of the CoBra movement, in which Pierre Alechinsky and Hugo Claus also participate in models. His possible works are the logograms he made – an original mixture of words, poetry and painting that expands into graphic poems. On the basis of more than 200 works and archival documents, the great diversity of logograms is highlighted and the visitor is given an insight into the laboratory of Dotremont’s creative process. The Belgian artist was a tireless experimenter. The fact that he suffered from tuberculosis has a lot to do with that, and that tragicomic vitality is also reflected in his work.
“His famous logograms are poetic expressions with a visual dimension; this interaction makes him a true ‘painter-poet’. For the first time, the public will have the opportunity in the same space to discover, in addition to works belonging to art history, other documents that shed light on the genesis of the logogram and provide a key to understanding his immense work, says Laurence Boudart, co-curator and director of the Archives & Musée de la Littérature (AML).
From Picasso to Lady Gaga
The focus exhibition on ‘The Murder on Marat’ is of a completely different caliber. The masterpiece by the French neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David is owned by the RMFAB and has been subjected to an extensive equipment-technical research with digital imaging techniques such as infrared reflectography. For example, the researchers found that the paper that changed the character.
“Although much has been written on the subject, our analysis has yielded surprising discoveries. One of the acquaintances is the compositional change in the way faces of face and hand were painted. This shows that the artist wanted to strengthen the political character of his work,” says Catherine Defeyt, researcher at the FED-tWIN project (KMSKB-ULiège).
The exhibition also shows three of the four answers made from the painting and a second room shows the influence on works by generations of modern artists. There is, for example, the political critique of Ai Weiwei with his self-portrait as a castaway, an autobiographically supplemented work by Pablo Picasso and the video portrait of Bob Wilson with Lady Gaga as Marat.
“This icon of the French Revolution also enjoys absolute cult status among later generations of artists. After all, David translates a complex story about a political assassination into a radically new, timeless image of secular martyrdom and enlightenment,” says Francisca Vandepitte, curator and curator of the Modern Art Collection at the KMSKB.
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