KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Freek Wambacq

Übst Du noch, oder spielst Du schon?

Freek Wambacq’s work investigates the complex relations between sculpture, installation and architecture. Including found materials and objects, it can be seen in the context of Minimal Art and Arte Povera, whose intellectual pretence it undermines with distinctively subtle humour.

Wambacq’s installations, which contain numerous references to the history of modern art, question the conditions of artistic creation and presentation by means of a suggestive approach echoed by an acute sense of irony and carefully staged arrangements. Wambacq’s practice draws on DIY techniques, historic hobbyists’ manuals, handicraft catalogues and jumble sales displays, resulting in a highly diverse sculptural vernacular that takes the shape of heaps, stacks, pedestals and racks, accumulated from objects which are indiscriminately sourced from nature or the nearest DIY shop. Garden hoses, wooden frames, bric-a-brac, sea shells or the gnarled root of an African tree thus gather to form aesthetically challenging arrangements, which invariably make reference to the object’s initial functionality while unfolding complex stories or art-historical connections.

“Übst Du noch, oder spielst Du schon?” brings together work created during the artist’s residency in Berlin. In the context of this solo exhibition, the individual pieces – whose titles, as is common for Wambacq’s work, provide important clues for their understanding – assemble to create a multilayered entity. Wambacq also devised his first large-scale mural in the gallery space – a graffiti relying on the so-called ‘piss technique’, by using a fire extinguisher.

Exhibition
21.01. – 06.02.2011
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
20.01.2011
7 - 10 pm

Freek Wambacq is currently an artist in residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien as a grantee of the Flemish Government, Brussels.