Michaël Borremans: The Performance
Texts by Patrick T. Murphy, Hans Rudolf Reust, and Ziba de Weck Ardalan
A plastic cap is placed carefully over a prim woman\s hair. Three men wearing lab coats bend intensely over an equal number of women, examining their pupils. Two serious, smart women contemplate a white table. A man in a suit and tie smirks lightly while holding pairs of red spheres, perhaps cherries, between his fingers. A middle-aged schoolmarm sketches a windmill on the naked back of a small, brown-haired child. The figures in Michaël Borremans\s enigmatic paintings are for the moment preoccupied with a meticulous task. For how long, one wonders, have they been doing this, and for how long will they continue? The viewer, so accustomed by now to looking at everything quicker and quicker still, cannot help but look ever more deeply into these mesmerizing, puzzling oils. Borremans has caught his subjects in action, totally committed and concentrated, and they demand as much from the viewer. But no matter how close one looks, no real specificity is discernible in the depicted characters; notions of concrete time and place are dissolved in neutral tones of taupe and ochre. The vagueness of their middle-class restraint triggers a world of mildly ironic mystery, worthy of further contemplation.
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
Artists: Michaël Borremans
Contributors: Patrick T. Murphy, Hans Rudolf Reust, Ziba de Weck Ardalan
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 7 x 9 3/4 in (17.8 x 24.8 cm)
Pages: 112
Reproductions: 45 color
ISBN: 9783775715898
Retail: $30 US & Canada
Status: Out Of Print
Michaël Borremans
Michaël Borremans was born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium. In 1996, he received his M.F.A. from Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst, Campus St. Lucas, in Ghent. David Zwirner has represented the artist’s works since 2001. Previous solo exhibitions at the gallery include Black Mould (London, 2015) The Devil’s Dress (New York, 2011), Taking Turns (New York, 2009), Horse Hunting (New York, 2006), and Trickland (New York, 2003). Borremans’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of prominent institutions. Most recently, Michaël Borremans: Fixture, was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015–2016. A major museum survey, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, which included one hundred works from the past two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. The exhibition traveled later in the year to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, followed by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2015. Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist’s first museum solo show in Japan, was also on view in 2014 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.