Presentation of Michael Van den Abeele & Laurent Dupont in collaboration with Gauli Zitter.
“Both artists recruit a new kind of headlessness. At first Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Martin Kippenberger’s pallets, packaging multiples, and oatmeal-and-paint coated Ford Capri might come to mind, but the mood here is humble, there is a lack of showmanship, outsourcing, deadpan, or aggression, and rather a willing submission to limitations. The work is quieter, more amateur and industrious than that of artists like Michael Krebber or Lutz Bacher. With programmatic, almost obsessive, practices, Dupont and van den Abeele emphasize the body’s current dissociation from spirit and passion, in a morally decadent age marked by extreme consumption but lacking the debauched sensuality of previous cultural declines. These Belgians seem to be interested in blood, sweat, and tears, in conjuring passion through restricted means, and a redemption perhaps acquired through this process.”
