The World as a Pavilion is the title of the exhibition at the Brussels Bozar showcasing a retrospective of the experimental work and research of Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter (1948-1998). During this prolific period spanning five decades, Richter produced a number of unique and significant projects blending architectural projects and visual arts.
BOZAR (Museum of fine Arts) and the MSU (Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art) both joined forces to organise this during the Croatian European Union Presidency.
On one side, this exhibition showcases a reassuring world, with familiar craftsmen of yesteryear, working their old trades and on the other, a darker and more disturbing side , populated with the psychotic or mentally ill, common criminals, collaborators, spies or souls possessed of by devil. To add to the general feeling of discomfort, about half of these dolls are automated, performing repetitive actions as you move around. A bit of the Adventures of Tintin but for adults, if you like…
This exhibit is held at the Bozar only until 21st of July 2020
Pictures of the “Mondo Cane†Exposition
The Knife-Grinder of Wexford
Brigitte Pannecoucke in a wheelchair
Mentally ill face of Brigitte Pannecoucke
Chef Sateri, nicknamed Il Pesce (the fish)
Close up picture on Sateri
Franceline De Veugeleir
Franceline De Veugeleir close-up on face
Mosquetero sin dinero of his real name Raf Smulkens
De Belder Guido, the inventor of Magical Abstract Realist Romanticism
Closeup on the face of De Belder Guido, the painter
The Rat woman
At her feet the rat and the filth
The face of the rat woman
The fool
Rocco Swenty Di Malaga, the ventriloquist
Jacobina Bienebol, the daugher of the preacher
Closep-up on the face of Jacobina Bienebol
Ilse Koch
The Swiss murderer
Closer look at the face of the Swiss
The body of Klottemans
The face of Klottemans
Irmgard Speck, the introverted
Closer look at the detail of the face of Irmgard Speck
Flap the failed comedian
Flip standing on the cart
Close-up on the face of Flip
Kristinus Oplinus, the devout catholic turned Satan’s spawn
“Le coeur au ventre” exposition invites you to discover the private collection Marion et Ludovic Oster, immersing you into a recreation of their private household universe and the thousands of object that surround them in their daily lives. Mixing voodoo, Haitian, African, popular, naive art objects, religious, singular and raw objects, the collection blurs hierarchies, categories, eras and societies.
This impressive personal collection is under display at the Art & Marges Museum until 11 October 2020
Pictures of the “Le Coeur au Ventre” Exposition
Coat hanger marks the entrance of the “Coeur au Ventre” Exposition
Some of the art featured in the entrance was made by Micheal Golz (Germany), an artist who is best known for mapping out a imaginary world named Athosland as a bit of an outcast child growing up with learning disabilities. Started in the 1960’s, this has become a life-long project for him that has spanned for over fifty years now.
Larry Beaver (USA) is haunted by voice and faces, his art helps him ease his mental illness
Marion Oster known as “Lucrèce” draws from her art from childhood in Africa
These big tarot cards above are the work of the artist Yves-Jules. Bulimic at work, he intuitively or on command creates an astonishing number of portraits relating to royal and presidential families around the world. Conscientious, Yves dissects and interprets, with a magnifying glass, each detail of the photos which serve as models and enlarges them on the canvas in layers of acrylic. The language of colors does the rest. The work is characterized by a meticulous and lively highlighting of each element, previously drawn with a thick black line, which makes the artist’s style so personal and recognizable.
Francis Marshall trained as a sculptor woodworker and for 37 years he worked as a teacher at the art school of Le Havre. Starting in the 1990’s, he made over 150 painting with frames and scriptures such as the one below and above using recycled items.
Located on the emblematic site of the former Belle-Vue brewery, The MIMA (Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art) is an all new contemporary art museum dedicated to Culture 2.0. With their latest “Zoo†exhibit, you are invited to enter an anthropomorphic universe where animals come out of cages to see what these furry or feathered characters tell us about Humans.
This visually very strong exhibition presents the work of eleven international artists from all walks of life: graphics, illustration, graffiti, tattoo, etc. Sections of art too often neglected. Here a carnivorous smile crunches a critique of society, there it expresses our bestiality. Suggestive and satirical, this always pop culture exhibition prompts spectators to take another look at their own nature and their place in this world.
This joyfully colorful wild vision of society exhibit is until August 30 in Brussels.
Staring with the wild signature style of Swedish artist @Finsta
Piet Parra (NL) is visual artist, former professional skateboarder, graphic artist, fashion designer and musician he is a jack of all trades. His aesthetics combines a talent for the visual with a poetics of the absurd where characters and freehand typography are discretely intertwined. The Dutchman is also the brilliant creator of the MIMA logo!
His art is easily recognized by the funny bird-headed characters that are his trademark
Based in Los Angeles, Steven Harrington explores the psychedelic pop scene. His works are rooted deep in the California hippie culture. In his creation below, he envisions a wolf visiting his own universe in his painting, which morphs into a “living” sculpture. The message conveyed by him is: “Choose the role you want to play in life, it is your actions that define you.”
Marti Sawe is a Spanish artist that paints and sculpts by collage, superimposition and contrast of colors. The patchwork of techniques and collage come together into a global subject that is recognizable at first glance used by the artist to deliver a critical message about the society we live in. His themes often portrait the invasion of technology in our lives and our resulting distancing from nature. The artist delivers a reflection on the purpose of technology, the overdose of social networking and the symbolic hijacking of the image of the animal to exploit emotions when our humanity is driving them to brick of extinction.
Pablo Dalas is a French visual artist and tattoo designer exploring the aesthetics of old animated movie characters. He loves to distort his subjects with an illusion of rapid film movement, known as smears in animated films. The excessive repetition of the effect gives a nightmarish taint to a childlike universe that is normally reassuring. By hijacking Disney aesthetic, which has been fabricating children’s dreams for almost a century, Pablo Dalas critics our immature society locked in a fantasy worldview that remains cut off from reality and its responsibilities.
Rhys Lee (Australia) is a Melbourne artist that specializing in hybrid totem figures on canvas or in ceramic. The Artist’s works are infused with a graphic presence of the cartoon character, bordering on grotesque and macabre. His strokes are fast and spontaneous with great freedom. These qualities recall the urgency and vitality so present in graffiti, something he explored intensely during the ’90’s when he was out as a street artist.
Russell Maurice (UK) is English artist and a leading figure of a pictorial movement named the “Comic Abstraction movement” who takes from the aesthetics of the earlier part of our 20th century animations. Artists who identified with this movement, usually come from a street graffiti background .
Todd James (US) is a New York artist that first gained notoriety under the alias REAS as a young graffiti street artist in the earlier portion of the 1980’s. Today his art mostly depicts cartoons. He was part of the exhibits: “Beautiful Losers”, “Street Market” and “Art in the Street”, which were the precursors that knocked open the doors of contemporary art to artists from street subcultures. The art he chose for this particular exhibit expose the military-industrial lobby of which the American dream was based upon.
Ryan Travis Christian (US) With great talent, this Chicago-based artist portraits a dysfunctional society. His drawings are evocative of old cartoons, scorned for committing desecrating the innocence that covers the eyes of young. Through the use of vintage cartoons, he both celebrates and denouces the American model. He blames the conformism of the individual and his stereotypical view of the world as manufactured by the entertainment industry. The cartoons also tackle social issues such as drugs and violence immigration.
This Belgian artist identifies with the Lowbrow movement, a popular art movement that takes it’s origins from a mix of things: Underground comic books and video games, tikki culture, graffiti street art and tattoo… Lowbrow art is often includes humor, as is the work of artist here at times joyful and others sarcastic and mischievous. Often portrayed in a cheery patchwork of images with meanings superimposed on the canvas reflects the image of a Western culture that are recycled ad nauseum,
A closer look reveals the Belgian political circus depicted here
Artist Egle Zvirblyte (Lithuania) The XL curves of the women depicted in these drawings is an ode to a liberated and self-assured female sexuality. Egle’s work is both modern and pop, as if Matisse’s “Dance” had embarked on the Beatles’ “Yellow submarine”. The characters depicted are an hymn to life and hedonism. Zvirblyte has created for the ZOO Exhibit a labyrinth inspired by the “unicursal” model in Greek mythology.The art work is named the “temple of transmutation” and is separated into three distinct areas named: Celebration, Honoring and Ritual of transformation.
View from the open rooftop over the Canal in Molenbeek area
The Punk Graphics expo: Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, was originally created in 2018 at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York and is now shown for the first time in Europe at the ADAM Brussels Design Museum. The exhibit is is based on Andrew Kristine’s extensive collection of punk memorabilia that includes flyers, posters, albums, promotional items and fanzines from 1976 to 1986.
In his youth, this New York investment banker was a front-seat witness to the birth of the punk movement. Fascinated by the inventiveness of punk graphic productions, began his collecting early as a teenager, and has accumulated over 3000 pieces over the space of four decades.
Siouxsie and the Banshees and Hüsker Dü posters
His exhibition illustrates in particular the influence of the anti-establishment attitude of this counter culture, which favored a ‘DIY’ and ‘artisanal’ approach at a time when the professional graphic sector were turning to computers. The bands created their own posters and record covers, while fans created flyers and fanzines using typewriters, cutting letters out from newspapers and magazines to design their own rebel typography.
GBH & Killing Joke posters
Punk graphics is also characterized by a great freedom of inspiration: all art forms, teen pop culture (comics, popular novels, science fiction, horror films, etc.) or the style of the 1950s and 1960s were appropriated freely. Collage was the reference technique; stencil the preferred mode of reproduction; contestation, irony and bright colors the essential ingredients.
Here displayed a collection of Belgian punk vinyls records
There was a reciprocal relationship between the art world and the punk music scene, especially in cities like New York and London. The Andy Warhol influence can be easily seen for instance just below with the portraits of artists below of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Ian Dury.
Andy Warhol Pop art reflected in these portraits
After studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic in 1978, Peter Saville became one of the founding members of Factory Records. Saville created many memorable album covers and promotions for bands and projects associated with the company including designs for Joy Division and its successor band New Order. In step with the postmodernist tendencies of the times, Saville often looked to art and design history for inspiration. For this poster below used to promote the album Closer, Saville explores the neoclassical.
The poster features a contemporaneous photograph taken by Bernard Pierre Wolff of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa’s famed Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, sculpted by Demetrio Pernio around 1910. Rendered beautifully in dramatic light and shadow, it depicts the scene of the family’s bereavement. The image and the classical typography were chosen for their ability to quickly contrast the very modem music of the band with this seemingly ancient image in which it was wrapped. It was, however, an image whose grieving tone would be brought much closer to home following the tragic suicide of Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis.
Punk chic
One of the most iconic images of rock music (below on the left) when Pennie Smith captured The Clash bassist Paul Simonon smashing his guitar against the stage during a concert at The Palladium in New York in 1979. The image is framed by the pink and green typography mimicking Elvis Presley’s 1956 eponymous debut album.
Despite these two strong visual elements, this promotional poster owes much to artist Andy Warhol and his use of repetition. The horizontal step-and-repeat of the design creates a still animation effect of this frenzied action, while also alluding to Warhol’s own series of Elvis canvases, which ranged from a single iconic pose to multiple repeat images of the singer.
Colorful art in the rooms of the Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die exhibit
Answer WE ARE DEVO Poster!!! The mention on the bottom refer to “Jocko Homo” the B-side of their 1st single, “Mongoloid”
Walking around the Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die exhibit
Black Flag and D.O.A. are some of the founders of the Punk Hardcore movement that started late “70’s was of my era
Jamie Reid, creator of legendary graphics for the Sex Pistols, designed this poster to promote the single California Ãœber Alles, an anti-fascist song from the San Francisco based Punk band the Dead Kennedys. The title refers to the first stanza of the German national anthem “Deutschland, Deutschland Ãœber alles” (“Germany, Germany above everything”), a lyric that was dropped following the end of World War II because of its close associations with Nazism and anti-Antisemitism.
The 1979 song is a satirical attack on Jerry Brown, then Governor of California (1975-1983) and depicts a fascist vision of a future America based on post-hippie values. In this imagined totalitarian world, a California ethos of healthy living, cheerful music, and fashion-consciousness dominates a docile society ruled by a liberal dictator. Reid uses the swastika adorned with cannabis leaves to create a decorative border, a design treatment that evokes its pre-Nazi era use as a symbol of good fortune in, among other things, architectural pat-terns and decorative tile work.
Here is a video of the Dead Kennedys in concert with the 7-inch single version of the song playing
Long before the swastika was adopted by the Nazis in the 1930’s, it was widely used in various cultures around the world for centuries, from its ancient roots as an Eastern religious icon in Hinduism and Buddhism to a sign of auspiciousness and good luck in Western Greek, Celtic, and Baltic traditions.
The same year in 1979 and at the age of 21, Jello Biafra ran for Mayor of San Francisco. His platform was quite unconventional and included ideas such as requiring police officers to run for election by the residents of the neighborhoods they patrol, legalizing squatting in vacant buildings and forcing businessmen to wear clown suits within the SF city limits, He came In 3rd out of 10 In the Mayoral Race.
Jello Biafra with NOMEANSNO “The Sky Is Falling and I Want My Mommy” poster promoting the new album.
Which Punk era are you from? The Circle Jerks sticker there was one of the iconic bands of my era
CRASS Band Punk/political artist Gee Vaucher’s “Your Country Needs You.†Anti-War song was released with the uncensored re-issue on The bands album “The Feeding of the 5,000.”
Some of the more noticeable posters among them Talking Heads, PIL, Bauhaus & Butthole Surfers on the left.
American artist Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene for the Black Flag album covers and band logo. His target in the Zine zine above was the drug-wrecked hippie movement of the 1960’s.
Plastic Bertrand was the internationally known be Belgian New Wave Artist for his hit single “Ça plane pour moi”.
The Clash 1979 Tour & Give them enough rope album posters
The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees & The Damned posters on display
Talking Heads Speaking Tongues LP
Punks often used dark humor imagery to provoke, the picture of German abbot Alban Schachleiter walking among rows of Nazi brownshirts offering Hitler salutes and appearing to return the salute is a great example and was used for a concert poster in the early 1980 while promoting the Malicious Damage album and was also used on Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!
