Dirk Braeckman
28 Oct - 26 Nov 2011
DIRK BRAECKMAN
28 October – 26 November, 2011
ANTWERP – Zeno X Gallery is very pleased to announce Dirk Braeckman’s solo show at the gallery, presenting more than ten new works.
(...)
When we see photographs by the Belgian artist Dirk Braeckman installed in museums, we seem to be looking at photographs that aspire to the condition of painting. They demand as slow an act of looking as any painting. They have the same richness and variety of tones of grey as works by Richter or Celmins. Indeed, Braeckman’s most famous photograph, C.O.-I.S.L.-94, was a photograph of a painting. Before printing he re-cropped it so we see nothing of the frame or surroundings. But this is no normal reproduction of a painting: the light catches the bumpiness of the painting, the lines made by the vertical stretcher bar. Every scratch or nail is as clear as a blemish or mole on a person’s face. A banal painting becomes a beautiful photograph, at once meditative and haunting.
Yet Braeckman is seeking neither to be a painter manqué nor to supplant painting. When he talks about photography, he could easily be talking about painting:
‘A photograph is, in fact, nothing more than a surface made up of blacks, whites and greys. This entirely abstract vision for me dovetails with what is pictured in the photo: a portrait, an anecdote.
It fluctuates, in my own work too, between abstraction and representation; between the object, the material and the representation, the reality behind it, the so-called real image.’
There are few photographers more committed to the specifics of their own medium. Rather, his antipathy to easy snapshots, his concern with the mysteriousness of banal things and rooms, with letting a place reveal itself slowly through time, means his work runs in parallel with certain kinds of painting but retains its photographic status. Like some other recent photographic works, they hang more comfortably alongside paintings than many photographs in the past.
(...)
Tony Godfrey, in: Painting Today, Phaidon, London / New York, 2009 Dirk Braeckman has been working with Zeno X from 1999 onwards. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at SMAK, Ghent (BE) and De Pont Foundation, Tilburg (NL) amongst others. The Royal Family of Belgium commissioned the artist for a permanent installation in the Sphinx Room of the Royal Palace in Brussels.
A retrospective of Braeckman’s work is currently on view at M Museum in Leuven (BE) which will run through January 7, 2012 and will travel to De Appel in Amsterdam (NL). On the occasion of this exhibition a comprehensive book on Braeckman’s oeuvre has been published by Roma Publications with texts by Martin Germann and Dirk Lauwaert.
A new documentary on Dirk Braeckman, created by the Flemish Television in the artist portraits series ‘Goudvis’, will be broadcasted on November 20st.
Dirk Braeckman’s new website is online, organized like and archival space in which the broad spectrum of Dirk Braeckman's artistic practice is presented in a non-linear way. The result reads like an assemblage of images, documents, project files and texts, spanning the artist's career for over the last 25 years.
www.dirkbraeckman.be
28 October – 26 November, 2011
ANTWERP – Zeno X Gallery is very pleased to announce Dirk Braeckman’s solo show at the gallery, presenting more than ten new works.
(...)
When we see photographs by the Belgian artist Dirk Braeckman installed in museums, we seem to be looking at photographs that aspire to the condition of painting. They demand as slow an act of looking as any painting. They have the same richness and variety of tones of grey as works by Richter or Celmins. Indeed, Braeckman’s most famous photograph, C.O.-I.S.L.-94, was a photograph of a painting. Before printing he re-cropped it so we see nothing of the frame or surroundings. But this is no normal reproduction of a painting: the light catches the bumpiness of the painting, the lines made by the vertical stretcher bar. Every scratch or nail is as clear as a blemish or mole on a person’s face. A banal painting becomes a beautiful photograph, at once meditative and haunting.
Yet Braeckman is seeking neither to be a painter manqué nor to supplant painting. When he talks about photography, he could easily be talking about painting:
‘A photograph is, in fact, nothing more than a surface made up of blacks, whites and greys. This entirely abstract vision for me dovetails with what is pictured in the photo: a portrait, an anecdote.
It fluctuates, in my own work too, between abstraction and representation; between the object, the material and the representation, the reality behind it, the so-called real image.’
There are few photographers more committed to the specifics of their own medium. Rather, his antipathy to easy snapshots, his concern with the mysteriousness of banal things and rooms, with letting a place reveal itself slowly through time, means his work runs in parallel with certain kinds of painting but retains its photographic status. Like some other recent photographic works, they hang more comfortably alongside paintings than many photographs in the past.
(...)
Tony Godfrey, in: Painting Today, Phaidon, London / New York, 2009 Dirk Braeckman has been working with Zeno X from 1999 onwards. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at SMAK, Ghent (BE) and De Pont Foundation, Tilburg (NL) amongst others. The Royal Family of Belgium commissioned the artist for a permanent installation in the Sphinx Room of the Royal Palace in Brussels.
A retrospective of Braeckman’s work is currently on view at M Museum in Leuven (BE) which will run through January 7, 2012 and will travel to De Appel in Amsterdam (NL). On the occasion of this exhibition a comprehensive book on Braeckman’s oeuvre has been published by Roma Publications with texts by Martin Germann and Dirk Lauwaert.
A new documentary on Dirk Braeckman, created by the Flemish Television in the artist portraits series ‘Goudvis’, will be broadcasted on November 20st.
Dirk Braeckman’s new website is online, organized like and archival space in which the broad spectrum of Dirk Braeckman's artistic practice is presented in a non-linear way. The result reads like an assemblage of images, documents, project files and texts, spanning the artist's career for over the last 25 years.
www.dirkbraeckman.be