Joep Van Liefland at AMP, Greece

‘Video Palace’ is an open-ended artwork, which the artist has been installing in different locations (art spaces but also the public realm) since 2002 and is based on two activities of the artist: the creation of a massive video collection and the production of his own films, where the protagonist is mostly himself. Van Liefland’s video collection spans from B to Z movies: erotic, horror to promotional tapes for companies, travel, pet movies, propaganda and informational films.

For his own films, Van Liefland uses the iconography of the videos he collects but breaks down their format in order to produce new meaning and reflect thus on the medium. In his own words, his films are ‘poetic de-reconstructions’ of existing media.

His paintings are also referential to the media culture. They deal with serial commodities which were originally produced for media storage and have been transformed. Van Liefland has a has a great interest in media that shift from new to avant-garde commodities and end up being anonymous. His paintings could be seen as mechanically assembled reproductions of serial commodities.

Afterlife is an archaeology, an exploration of the territory of the video medium. Released from any nostalgic concerns, Van Liefland’s work reveals its deep concern in the multifaceted existence of video: its technical development, distribution, content of films, its copy element, its different market segments, the stores and its contextual relation to art.

Crucial to Van Liefland is what the artist calls ‘media-entropy’, a term which refers to the media formats which are in decay. ‘Media-entropy’ refers to the transformations on information, on a cultural level but also to the physicality of the media – video is bound to the body and the changes in infrastructure – video shops and rentals that are gradually disappearing

berlin gallery weekend

norbert schwontowski, robert rauschenberg, georg herold, Amy Sillman, carsten höller, erik van der weijde, geerten verheus.

Luc Tuymans Wiels gallery Brussels

The first solo show of Antwerp-born Luc Tuymans in Brussels’ Wiels gallery presents 22 new paintings, created by the artist especially for this show, in world premiere. This show, titled Against the Day, is the third and last part of a triptych that began with the series Les Revenants, which was referring to the power of the Jesuit Order and Forever. The Management of Magic, which was about the Walt Disney phenomenon. The show will be running until August 2, 2009.

In these new paintings, Tuymans continues his research on virtual reality, utopia and visual language and focuses more specifically on virtual images without any sense of reality. The artist thus expands his work on the illusion and the manipulation of images with new painted proposals.

Luc Tuymans is considered one of the most significant and influential contemporary painters working today. He is one of the key figures of a new generation of figurative painters who have continued to paint during a time when many believed the medium had lost its relevance. In the context of the new information age, many artists felt that painting was a deeply conservative form of expression which did not match the heterogeneous nature of contemporary experience. Tuymans' work specifically addresses the challenge of the inadequacy and 'belatedness', as he puts it, of painting.

Tuymans was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1958 and began to study fine art in 1976. He concentrated on painting but in the early 1980s he lost faith in the medium and gave up for two years. During this time he worked as a film-maker, and when he returned to painting in the mid-1980s, he introduced new techniques such as cropping, close-ups, framing and sequencing, which remain key elements of his work today.Luc Tuymans.

Tuymans' work is a vast repository of data, drawn from photography, television and film, combining a range of different styles and subject matter. His subjects range from major historical events, such as the Holocaust or the politics of the Belgian Congo, to the inconsequential and banal -wallpaper patterns, Christmas decorations, everyday objects.

Tuymans' range of imagery deliberately resists categorization. Events and ideas are not expressed explicitly, but implied through subtle hints and allusions, creating an ambiguous collage of disconnected fragments and details