ABSTRACT HISTORY

ABSTRACT HISTORY
vernissage: Thursday, 09 February at 6 p.m.
St. Lucas Antwerp, St.-Jozefstr. 35, 2018 Antwerp
opening hours: 09 February-06 March 8.30 a.m.-6 p.m. (on school days only)

Frankfurt part 5 Foyer

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One Year of Midnight Coffee Previews part 1

How To Stay Awake – One Year of Midnight Coffee Previews
Friday, 9 December 2011 – 21:00 untill 03:00
Novylon, Zendelingenstraat 38, 2140 Antwerp, Belgium

On the night of December 9th, to celebrate one year of Midnight Coffee Preview, a group-show will take place with all artists that have participated in the last year. The exhibition is one-night-only and opens in normal preview style at 21:00 (with alcoholic refreshments), from midnight onwards there will be a series of live performances and a variety of the world‘s most refined coffees will be served.

Sophie Anson
Tomas Boiy
Maurice Carlin
Helene Claes
Tom Fritz
Katrien Hendrickx & Ine Van Coillie
Oscar Hugal
Alwin Lay
Warre Mulder
Yiannis Papadopoulos
David Price
G. Leddington & Koen Sels
Gert Thierens
Veronik Willems

Midnight Coffee Preview is a regular platform to present new and previously un-exhibited artworks. Initiated out of a desire and need for deadlines, MCP promotes artists to air recent developments in their practice and to receive developmental critique from peers in an informal setting, away from the usual pressures of exhibition making. Each preview begins at midnight and continues until the last visitor has left or fallen asleep …
MCP is initiated by G. Leddington and Ben Van den Berghe.

LINK to facebook
LINK to website

Frankfurt part 4 Foyer

a proposal for a work formulated in between a description of a situation and location

a group exhibition presenting the works of x artists who for the same amount of time resided at the same location  this is the common denominator and any resemblances are coincidental

an information stand holding a with text engraved plate, describing the transition from one language to another and back

a site connecting a stairwell with a basement, the basement with a gallery and the gallery with the stairwell

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FRANKFURT part 2 & 3

Artists in Residence 2011 – Jahresausstellung der Gastkünstler in Frankfurt
Jörg Auzinger (Vienna), Akos Czigany (Budapest), Katrin Huber (Salzburg), Oscar Hugal (Antwerp), Magnus Logi Kristinsson (Helsinki), Jaehyung Lee (Seoul), Erik Mátrai (Budapest), Nives Sertic (Dubrovnik), Sonia Shiel (Dublin), Wouter Van der Hallen (Antwerp)
Exhibition: 19.11.- 26.1.2011
Atelierfrankfurt e.V.
Hohenstaufenstrasse 13-25
60327 Frankfurt am Main
Vernissage: 18.11.2011, 18.00
Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 16.00 – 19.00,
Wednesday 16.00 – 20.00 and by appointment
Phone: 069 – 74 30 3771
Email: buero@atelierfrankfurt.de

Open Doors 2011
Vernissage
Friday 18. November, 18:00
AtelierFrankfurt
Hohenstaufenstraße 13–25
60327 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours
Saturday 19. November, 14:00 – 21:00
Sunday 20. November, 14:00 – 18:00

the program can be downloaded HERE and additional information can be found HERE.

THE SECOND ACT part 3

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Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Barnett Newman’s largest painting at the time of its completion, is meant to overwhelm the senses. Viewers may be inclined to step back from it to see it all at once, but Newman instructed precisely the opposite. When the painting was first exhibited, in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman tacked to the wall a notice that read, “There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.” Newman believed deeply in the spiritual potential of abstract art. copyright MoMA 2010

Based upon this brief history I conceived and constructed Here & Now, an installation first shown during The Second Act at De Brakke Grond. The two main elements of the installation were 1) a copy of Newman’s notice and 2) a slide projector projecting an image inwards towards the center of the gallery. The image projected was a photograph made by someone who was asked to photograph Vir Heroicus Sublimis‘ picture plane as close as possible. … Motivation behind projecting this image inwards was twofold, viz. exploring the work’s possibility in restaging an initial experience and emphasizing it’s intent as a -’viewing’- structure from where the visitor had an overview on the works on display. excerpt from a conversation between J. Gray and the artist. copyright © 2011 Oscar Hugal

STEVE VAN DEN BOSCH Quote Unquote

Steve Van den Bosch Quote Unquote @ Van Der Mieden until October 22, 2011

A SLOWDOWN AT THE MUSEUM part 3

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A SLOWDOWN AT THE MUSEUM part 2

a short text by Mihnea Mircan on Cathedra for A Slowdown at the Museum

“Cathedra came into existence while I was preoccupied with Barnett Newman and Abstract Expressionism’s notion of a picture being both physical and metaphysical. The physicality of canvas, frame and paint, in relation to a notion of the picture as a possible place of experience. A statement by Newman for his second solo show at Betty Parsons, acknowledged this: ‘There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance’. With this in the back of my mind I started working on something that involved a wall text or title placard, ‘devices’ commonly accompanying and referring to – nearby – artworks. Wanting to produce a work that oscillates between its own presence and its subject matter, I superimposed one on top of the other.” One of Oscar Hugal’s constant preoccupations is distance and the modes of imprecision it can generate and accommodate. The distance that is indicated – and somehow embodied – in Cathedra is the route separating Extra City from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and us from the close inspection of Barnett Newman painting, of the same title, held there. The wry equation in the work pairs the closeness of sensorial engagement and the quasi-mystical absorption solicited by Abstract Expressionist painting (“We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted… We are freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, nostalgia, legend, myth… Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history”, wrote Newman in a 1948 text titled The Sublime Is Now), the cultural gap separating us from that defunct mindset and the topographic remove between the two places of experience, that of the work and its ‘model’.
Hugal’s fine print, as blue as the blue expanse of Newman’s painting, compresses an entire array of gestures and positions that articulate, in their disparity and discontinuities, a vexed relation to tradition. At another level, Hugal pairs the preeminent tool of today’s knowledge transmission, Google, and the difficulty of an initiation into the terms, procedures and rewards of abstract art. Via Google, one could either obtain a low-resolution reproduction of a Newman painting, or traffic directions as to how to go and see one. These regimes of experience overlap in the work, which offers abstracted directions and pure calculations: a set of movements to be performed in order to reach the radiant immediacy of the painting, the choreography linking an abstract body, an abstract road and a painting that belongs to another place in time. copyright © 2011 Mihnea Mircan & Oscar Hugal

FRANKFURT part 1

Wouter Van der Hallen and me have been granted a 3 month residency – September untill November – at the Kulturbunker in Frankfurt. Parallel to this we are both participating in a groupshow at ATELIERFRANKFURT opening in November. More on that soon, but here are some pictures of the appartement.

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