BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts presents Valerie Mannaerts Orlando an exhibition on view 7 June–22 September 2013.
Working with the peculiar and rich qualities of the 1930s galleries at BOZAR, Valerie Mannerts’s show, Orlando, will present a selection of her latest sculptures, textiles, collages and drawings. Mannaerts treats the unique qualities of the space as a sculptural container in itself, exposing its own texture–the patterned hue of the marble floors and walls, the domed central atrium, the columns, arches and near-symmetry of the layout. At the same time, she makes a few, precise interventions into the given display set-up, for example, building narrow shelves into some of the walls, and designing a fan-shaped arrangement of plinths. In this way, the exhibition’s layout is imagined to be viewed from certain fixed points within its spatial volume, exaggerating the image-plane of the sculptural objects.
Mannaerts’s broader project is grown from the practice of improvisational drawing and collage, and in her body of work of the past decade she repeatedly investigates the back and forth perceptual relationship between two-dimensional images, and three dimensional object-matter. Often, found media images are collaged with found things that are treated also as compositional shapes—a stool, a pedestal or a ball, maybe—creating complex new forms. She allows found objects to become a prompt within the working process, suggesting the form a work might take. Although she often uses traditional sculptural materials such as clay or bronze, Mannaerts also introduces lighter touches that speak to an idea of decoration or adornment: painted paper fans, or gold ceramic glaze.
Whilst the show activates the unusual and highly formal display situation of the spaces, the artist also brings out its organic qualities, and those of her given and chosen materials: the veined stone architecture, the natural daylight which she has deliberately retained instead of artificial lamps, and in her use of plants, including cacti, that are placed between the works. Mannaerts’s image and object choices compress different temporalities and material densities so that they create ‘knots’ of tactile and perceptual sensation, suggesting a mysterious coalescence in the artist’s imagination of the materiality of the natural and the man-made in the form of new “surrealities,” new fictions.
Curator: Catherine Wood
Production: BOZAR EXPO (Exhibitions Director: Sophie Lauwers, Exhibition Coordinator: Christel Tsilibaris)
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