Wim Delvoye Exhibition

Sperone Westwater

poster for Wim Delvoye Exhibition

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Sperone Westwater presents an exhibition of recent laser-cut stainless steel and bronze sculptures by Wim Delvoye. Known and described as a provocative and subversive artist, Delvoye is tied to a decontextualized symbolic duality that builds on the Belgian Surrealist tradition. By quoting and inserting Gothic, Baroque, or Rococo architecture in functional objects and industrial machinery as well as metamorphosizing religious icons and nineteenth-century sculptures, Delvoye recontextualizes these items – aestheticizes in some cases – and takes the creative process to the extreme.

This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Last year, Delvoye was invited by the Musée du Louvre in Paris to show his works as a counterpoint to the museum’s collection in the Napoleon III apartments as well as under the I.M. Pei pyramid on the Cour Carrée.
Suspended from the gallery’s ceiling will be a monumental 6-meter high Gothic tower made of stainless steel, Untitled (Suppo), 2010. Tall, spiraling, and slender, this work combines Delvoye’s recent experiments in twisted, anamorphosed ring-like sculptures and his earlier Gothic works. Also to be installed is a large-scale polished bronze sculpture, Dual Möbius Quad Corpus, 2010, which depicts contorted and warped crucifixes in a Möbius band – a single closed continuous curve with a twist. Other sculptures from this Holy Family series, in nickeled bronze, will be featured.

Another suite of nickeled bronze sculptures, including Daphnis & Chloë Rorschach II, 2012, reactivates the mythological figures of nineteenth-century academic sculptures by Mathurin Moreau, among others. Delvoye employs computerized reproduction techniques and then twists and further morphs their Baroque and Rococo forms even further. One half of the sculpture is a mirror image of the other, reiterating the principle of Rorschach plates.

Born in Belgium in 1965, Delvoye currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

[Image: Wim Delvoye “Penta Suppo (Counterclockwise)” (2013) nickeled bronze 98 x 11 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater]

Media

Schedule

from May 10, 2013 to July 26, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-05-10 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Wim Delvoye

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