BRAVE NEW, OLD WORLDS (an installation with more than 40 paintings)

The 21st century in profound images, be outraged!

The vernissage will take place on April 7, at 8 PM.

And will be initiated by a speech of Mr Bart Vandenabeele, Professor Art Philosophy and Aesthetics at Ghent University and author of the essay in Gabriëlla’s art book “Brave New Old Worlds”.

You can visit the exposition from April 7 to May 8, every working day from 9 AM to 8 PM.

Gabriëlla Cleuren will accompany you on a tour and discuss her work on
Thursday, April 14 and April 21 from 2 PM to 4 PM. She will also be signing her art book

Address: SD Worx, Brouwersvliet 2 - 2000 Antwerp
Route description : www.sdworx.be – offices – Antwerp

An installation with paintings.

My manifesto clarifies my point of departure for this exhibition.

It is an open invitation to discover my work.

A number of paintings, which have been incorporated in an installation here, illustrate my conclusions about my time in this collection of images. They were amalgamated over a long period of time (1990-2011), have since undergone some artistic changes and are now critically defined by their titles. I am regularly adding to this series.

Because I am fascinated by Goya’s work, who in his engravings and his black paintings was largely critical of his contemporaries, picturing memories, testimonials of the war between Spain and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I have chosen to establish parallels with my own time. The Human Condition has barely improved 200 years later.

Countless wars rage across our planet, but with more horrific consequences. Mankind is destroying its environment, its existence, its fellow men, in catastrophes of almost biblical proportions... You can easily demonstrate this by collecting images. The installation of paintings is built on this premise.

The collected images, MEMENTO OF THE 21st CENTURY, are numerous and easy to find: they represent prophesies, testimonials of revenge, oppression, blindness, greed, vanity, megalomania, chaos. I work specifically with this twenty-first century material: my time.

My medium is painting, sometimes also the object.

Because art is about transformation, the image is processed and changed. It is the unreality of reality, which has been made tolerable. Touch is the creative medium, and it is used to the extent that it does not undermine readability but disintegrates it in various degrees. Thus the creative medium is consciously used, and sometimes teeters on the edge of abstraction. It is systematically used, but spontaneously in order to preserve the emotion. Design is inconceivable without computer design and is linked to it.

Collecting is organising several things. This approach provides the insight that a single work is incapable of giving. It charts the path of the distance travelled, a path that previously was invisible, but is finally shaped based on a multitude of memories that are strung together.

This also applies to this installation. But at the end of the day, it’s always about painting: about an image which is held together by content, form, colour, and brush strokes.

Kind regards,

Gabriella Cleuren.

Visit my website: www.gabycleuren.com. You will find more information here about my work.