Arts Flanders

Cy Twombly
Photographs 1951-2010
1 February - 29 April 2012

The exhibition Cy Twombly. Photographs 1951-2010 presents more than 100 dry prints, generated from Polaroid photographs, which were selected in close cooperation with the artist himself prior to his death on July 5th, 2011. Cy Twombly's photographs have been a rather recent discovery. Snapping photographs with his Polaroid camera since his student days, the artist did not make available to the public his photographic material until the 90s. The subject matter of his photographs varies considerably. From still-life images of flowers and brushes, snap shots of his studio and museums interiors, details from his paintings to views of ancient temples and atmospheric landscapes, the ethereal and delicate photographs reveal the themes that have nourished the artist's paintings, drawings, sculptures and graphic art. The exhibition will include a number of paintings by Cy Twombly and the intimate cinematic portrait "Edwin Parker" by artist Tacita Dean as a tribute to the recently deceased greatest artist of our times.

Image: Cy Twombly, Brushes, Lexington,2005, dryprint on cardboard, 43,1 x 27,9 cm, courtesy : Schirmer/Mosel Verlag - Fondazione Nicola del Roscio

Per Kirkeby
And the Forbidden Paintings of Kurt Schwitters
10 February - 20 May 2012

The Centre for Fine Arts presents a retrospective of the work of Per Kirkeby (born in 1938), one of the key painters of the Danish avant-garde. But just what does avant-garde mean: rupture, minimalism, abstraction, borrowings, subversion? One can find all of those in a prolific body of work that began in the 1960s in the wake of the Fluxus movement. But that is only one aspect of a very diverse oeuvre that draws just as much on the figuration of Danish classicism and the experiments of 19th-century French masters such as Eugène Delacroix. Kirkeby cannot be pigeonholed, nor does he want to be: he prefers to relentlessly question the position and the perceptions of the observer. An artistic process that has seen him turn to different media (canvas, blackboards, paper, bronze, etc.) in an assertion of the freedom he finds, as a trained geologist, in the omnipresence of nature. It is in this context that the Kurt Schwitters room in the exhibition is so relevant. Here, Kirkeby is not confronted with the Dadaist, but with an unfamiliar, figurative Schwitters, in love with landscape. "Forbidden paintings" – from the point of view of the modernist mainstream, that is. The Danish artist recognises in this work his own credo: a visceral assertion of his freedom as an artist.

Image: Per Kirkeby Cossus ligniperda, 1989 Öl auf Leinwand 290 x 350 cm AROS Aarhus Museum, Denmark

More info: www.bozar.be