Art & Design
Covering artworks, artists, exhibits, musems and more
The Brussels Times Magazine
Jan Fabre once seemed unstoppable. An artistic force of nature, he seemed destined to be celebrated like the Flemish masters of centuries past. But amid a spate of sordid sexual allegations and an impending criminal trial, his carefully nurtured reputation could crumble. Fabre's tale raises awkward questions about whether we can still appreciate his art or if it will forever be tarnished.
Artful Taxidermy Inspired by Old Masters
ART + DESIGN
There’s a new story of beauty and beasts: “Our First Book” by Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren (Lannoo Publishers, 2018). It’s influenced by naturalist Charles Darwin and features the art of Dutch taxidermists Japp Sinke and Ferry van Tongeren, who combine 17th an 21st Century art by preserving modern wildlife in poses depicted in Old Masters’ paintings.
Looking at envelopes, we are reminded of the lost art of hand-writing letters, even in the face of love. Archival photographer Veronica Bailey of London explores “nostalgia for the threatened forms of human communication … and the lure of traditional forms of paper and script in a monotonously digitized age.”
ART + DESIGN
Originally from New York but living in Europe the past two decades, Erika Suess has been designing ball gowns for the past three years in the world’s capital of balls: Vienna, Austria. Her boutique there is frequented by local ball-goers and international visitors. Several U.S. and European celebrities have worn her designs, too, including Darryl Hannah, Jane Seymour, Missy May, and Barbara Wussow.
URBAN NATION Gives Street Art a Good Name
ART + DESIGN
Previously vilified by both police and polite society, street art has found a legal safe haven in Berlin thanks to the newly unveiled URBAN NATION Museum for Contemporary Art. The museum officially opens this month in the Schöneberg district, but an open-air exhibition throughout the city has been going on since 2013.
Spain is known for legendary art but its heritage lacks modern and contemporary pieces from certain parts of Europe, according to Brussels-based gallerist Roberto Polo, who is ceding about 7,000 works from his private collection to fill this gap. These pieces will be housed in a new Spanish state museum bearing his name in Toledo and Cuenca.
Michael Borrëmans: The Modern Figurativist
ART + DESIGN
When the Belgian drawer and photographer turned to painting, he was an instant success—a dream few artists realize. That was about 20 years ago. Today, Michaël Borremans is one of Belgium’s most famous living painters, with works in major museums and art fairs around the world.
Digital Arts Center Brightens City of Lights
ART + DESIGN
The City of Lights got brighter with the opening of L’Atelier des Lumières, an immersive digital art center that turns artworks like paintings into living dreams ... Set in an iron factory established in 1835 by the Plichon family, the 3,300 square meters of projection surface include more than 3,000 moving images projected by 140 laser video projectors to surround sounds from 50 speakers.
Paris Inspires Brussels in KANAL Centre Pompidou
ART + DESIGN
It was “Pompidou and circumstance” on May 5, 2018, when the French arts center opened its largest outpost outside of Paris, KANAL, in “raw” form in a former Citroën garage in Brussels. With nearly 400,000 square feet of space, the canal-hugging complex will eventually house the city’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, an architecture center (CIVA Foundation), stages for performing arts, and public spaces for culture, education, and recreation.
ART + DESIGN
French galleries no longer represent the majority of work at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in Paris. In 2018,
the 45th edition of the city’s most famous art show featured 195 galleries from 27 countries, with only a third from France. Three new countries were represented (Greece, Peru, and Ireland), 20 percent came from North America, and there were more from Asia, South America, North Africa, and the Middle East than ever before.
Photo London Pushes Boundaries in Contemporary Art
ART + DESIGN
Contemporary fine art photography is no longer just about traditional film and digital images. Now it includes mixed media such as sculpture and virtual reality, prints on a range of unusual surfaces from antique paper to layered glass, video on top of photographs, and even cross-stitched photo-like portraits.
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Fake News By Design: Russian Paper Revolution
ART + DESIGN
After the fall of the Russian Empire and end of the subsequent civil war, the Soviet Union was established in 1922. It gave birth to an artistic movement called constructivism, which, through propaganda and a reinterpretation of traditional art practices, created a new identity for the revolutionary state. To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, this
movement is featured at the ADAM Brussels Design Museum.
Het Kunstuur: Art Stories by the Hour
The Brussels Times Magazine
Mechelen, Hasselt and Roeselare do not boast fine art museums, but they now have temporary exhibitions that arguably do more. Thanks to Het Kunstuur ("The Art Hour"), masterpieces by Belgian painters, such as René Magritte, James Ensor, Paul Delvaux and Rik Wouters, are on display in heritage buildings in the centre of these cities. And they are being explained to audiences through special one-hour storytelling sessions.
The Brussels Times Magazine
In order to protect modern Ukrainian masterpiece paintings from war, several were carefully extracted from the country for a traveling exhibition. Aptly named “In the Eye of the Storm,” it features modern (1900-1930) Ukrainian artworks largely loaned by private collectors, so they have rarely been publicly seen if at all.
In the 1980s, the Clenet Series I was arguably the finest luxury car in the world. Its 1930s styling and hand craftsmanship was one of a kind. And it was designed by then 19-year-old Alfred J. DiMora, who took the original Clenet to the next level. He was a diamond in the rough who got the chance to shine when he created what Automotive Age called “Drive Art” and Fortune magazine dubbed the “American Rolls-Royce.”