Michaël Borremans: Weight
Texts by Ann Demeester, Massimiliano Gioni, Philippe-Alain Michaud, and Delfim Sardo
Belgium-based Michael Borremans creates absurd and sometimes ominous paintings. Horse Hunting (2005), for example, depicts, in a muddy palette, a pale and moody-looking man in a suit jacket and crisp white shirt shoving two twigs up his nose. He stares straight at us, and the wall behind him is filled with his shadow. Borremans has said of his paintings, “I use clichés and other elements that are part of a collective consciousness… my work would be perfect on biscuit tins.” At the 2006 Berlin Biennale, Borremans showed a film on a small LCD screen, which he had framed like a painting. The piece was based on a 2002 drawing of a girl, which he reproduced in three dimensions, so that the girl slowly spins around. Whatever the medium, Borremans’s work bears this trademark sense of absurdity verging on menace. Weight is published concurrently with an exhibition at De Appel in Amsterdam.
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
Artists: Michaël Borremans
Contributors: Ann Demeester, Massimiliano Gioni, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Delfim Sardo
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 7 1/4 x 9 1/2 in (18.4 x 24.1 cm)
Pages: 88
Reproductions: 55 color
ISBN: 9783775721301
Retail: $45 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.