‘Lost & Found’

Dauwens & Beernaert is delighted to present: Lost & Found, a group show commemorating the 100th anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s famous, ‘Fountain’: a quintessential example of what Duchamp called a ‘readymade’; an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist, as a work of art.

Lost & Found features found objects, assemblages and readymades. The group show features assemblages by Daniel Spoerri, and works from young, emerging artists from Belgium, France, Czech Republic and Switzerland.

The exhibition investigates how contemporary artists direct their distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility in engaging and observing, found objects.

Lost & Found features several assemblages by Daniel Spoerri explaining his “Tableaux Pièges” as follows: “objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) and are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical.” The snare-pictures at Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery consist of the remains of a meal eaten by guests of the waffle restaurant Kinders Siska.

Quinten Ingelaere and Loïc Van Zeebroek use found objects (a shelf, a pan, a folded copper plate) as carriers for a classic art form; painting. In a new series of photographs entitled, “The Archeology of Post-Capitalism” Adam Vackar investigates the (de)sexualization of mannequins. Laetitia de Chocqueuse’s unintended self-portrait is a found object, on the back of a frame: a posthumous self-portrait made by Time.

Other artists such as Maxim Frank, Stanislas Lahaut and Karl Philips deprive found objects: often household objects (a traffic sign, model ship, or ladder) from their initial teleology, their intrinsic purpose, and turn them into a Dadaist or absurdist and sometimes tragi-comic sculptures. Thus, profane yet functional objects are turned into sacred yet useless subjects: works of art. Alex Verhaest and Marco De Sanctis investigate what it means to be lost (and finally found) in translation.

 

Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery (press release)