Nel Aerts: 'Billenkoek'
28 Nov 2015 - 31 Jan 2016
KIOSK presents two new exhibitions with works by Nel Aerts (1987, Turnhout, BE) and Miet Warlop (1978, Torhout, BE). Both artists create universes that, in various guises and with different media, leave an immediate, poetic impression. Once immersed in them, the visitor will smile and grin at their ambiguous image worlds, before being left, moved and deserted.
Nel Aerts freely and intuitively moves between different media such as painting, drawing, collage, performance, and sculpture. Over the last couple of years, a growing focus on the portrait can be discerned in her work, resulting on works on paper and wooden panels.
For the occasion of her show 'Billenkoek', Aerts has assembled a new, motley crowd of abstracted, posing subjects and characters that refer to popular culture, her immediate everyday surroundings and the artist herself. The (self) portraits are tragicomic in the contrasts they evoke. They can be sad or funny, extraverted or inward-looking, deliberately or playfully crawled out of the wood or arisen from the imagination as a drawing, but invariably they are introspective and unassuming.
A selection of older and new paintings, and a new series of about sixty drawings interact with the KIOSK spaces in a number of installation interventions. The impression one gets is that of a portrait gallery with walls, windows, and floor covered with autonomous pieces, making the drawn space and the exhibition space flow into each other.
Nel Aerts freely and intuitively moves between different media such as painting, drawing, collage, performance, and sculpture. Over the last couple of years, a growing focus on the portrait can be discerned in her work, resulting on works on paper and wooden panels.
For the occasion of her show 'Billenkoek', Aerts has assembled a new, motley crowd of abstracted, posing subjects and characters that refer to popular culture, her immediate everyday surroundings and the artist herself. The (self) portraits are tragicomic in the contrasts they evoke. They can be sad or funny, extraverted or inward-looking, deliberately or playfully crawled out of the wood or arisen from the imagination as a drawing, but invariably they are introspective and unassuming.
A selection of older and new paintings, and a new series of about sixty drawings interact with the KIOSK spaces in a number of installation interventions. The impression one gets is that of a portrait gallery with walls, windows, and floor covered with autonomous pieces, making the drawn space and the exhibition space flow into each other.