From Paul Thek’s Accidental Etchings to Gabriel Kuri’s Cigarette Butts, Here Are 5 Must-See Shows in Brussels

Some cities are full of contradictions, and the Belgian capital
of Brussels is, delightfully, one of those places. The relatively
small but deeply international city has an impressive art scene, in
part because of its centrality—it’s a short train ride to London,
Paris, and Amsterdam, as you can tell by the hoards of lost
tourists—but also because the region is home to many serious and
discreet collectors with deep pockets, not to mention an
adventurous landscape of galleries.

When a few years ago the New York Times excitedly
declared that “Brussels was the new Berlin,” the pronouncement went
down like a lead balloon in the city in question. Brussels is
definitively its own kind of city, and it moves at its own pace.
Since then, Kanal mark 1, a co-production with the Center Pompidou
in Paris to be housed in a former Citroen car garage, has shown its
potential as a new art center. (It is now temporarily closed ahead
of its full-blown launch.) In the meantime, there is plenty of
first-rate contemporary art on offer in its leading public spaces
and commercial galleries this fall.

Here are our some of favorite exhibitions.

Than Hussein Clark at
Damien & the Love Guru

Than Hussein Clark, a film and theater buff, has an obvious love
for actors. For his exhibition “The Paintings of Selma Vaz Dias” at
Damien & the Love Guru, the artist managed to connect to the family
of the early 20th-century cinema star Selma Vaz Dias. Clark learned
that the groundbreaking English-Dutch actress Dias was also
something of a literary genius, not to mention political activist
and, later in life, an accomplished painter. Dias’s strikingly
brooding imagery, which draws on theatrical characters like clowns
and harlequins that are dark and dreamlike, is on view at the
gallery alongside Clark’s sculptures.

The Dias family generously allowed Clark to stage this
posthumous collaboration. (Dias’s works are on loan from the
artist’s estate.) Clark built the architectural surroundings to
encompass her small but striking paintings, including one small
figure on a tall iron stilt. The overlooked female painter does not
fade into the background amid Clark’s works, but rather forms the
exhibition’s spiritual and aesthetic core, with Clark’s clear
plastic and glass sculptures creating all kinds of sight lines for
her work.

Clark also premiered his theater performance, “Chamber Music for
Europe (Nonent for Selma Vaz Dias)” earlier this month. The new
work was inspired in part by her unpublished autobiography.

“Than Hussein Clark: The
Paintings of Selma Vaz Dias” is on view at Damien & the Love Guru, Rue de Tamines
19, 1060 Saint-Gilles, Belgium, September 5–October 24,
2019.

Hana Miletić at La Maison
Rendezvous

Early this year, four emerging international dealers founded a
time-share in Brussels to bring their distinct programs to the city
at the center of the European Union. Called La Maison de
Rendez-Vous, the venture has set up shop in a stunning,
19th-century apartment that feels grand yet homely, far from a
white cube. It’s therefore quite appropriate for the four art
dealers—Lulu of Mexico City, Misako & Rosen of
Mexico City, Park View/Paul Soto of Los Angeles,
and LambdaLambdaLambda of Prishtina, Kosovo—who are each known to
have curatorial-driven programs.

For this year’s Brussels Gallery Weekend slot,
LambdaLambdaLambda presents “Retour au travail,” an exhibition of
Brussels-based, Croatian artist Hana Miletić’s intricate and bright
textile works. Charming and quietly political, Miletić tight
abstract weavings are from her ongoing series “Materiale.” She has
collaborated with specialists drawn from craft and industrial
textile backgrounds. Previous iterations of the works were included
at her solo show at the WIELS Contemporary Art Center on the
outskirts of Brussels last year and in the Sharjah Biennial in
2017.

The show’s title recalls the stoical mood of workers after a
strike, demonstrations, or other industrial action. A floor piece,
called RAD (Work) (“rad” translates to
“work” in Croatian) represents a concern for working class
communities. The minimally-designed carpet features the word she
spotted on a woven tarp that the artist found in Zagreb. It is part
of a series of carpets she has developed with a Croatian carpet
factory, one of the few that did not shutter after the break
up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. “Retour au travail”
conjures the sense of a return to normalcy—but everything is
changed and nothing will be the same.

“Hana Miletić: Retour au travail” is
on view from LambdaLambdaLambda at La Maison Rendez-Vous, Avenue
Jef Lambeaux 23, 1060 Saint-Gilles, Belgium, September 5–October
19, 2019.

Gabriel Kuri at
WIELS

The odor of Gabriel Kuri’s extensive survey at WIELS precedes
it. The Brussels-based, Mexican artist has meticulously installed
at least 1,000 cigarette butts (plus coins and chewed gum) into two
large piles of sand which are parted like a sea. It is the first
installation you encounter upon entering the exhibion “sorted,
resorted,” and it assaults the senses.

In the following galleries and other floors of the contemporary
arts center, there are around 60 of Kuri’s sculptures, some of them
new and made specially for the show. They often make quippy
combinations pairing consumer goods with natural materials like
sand, shells, or stones. The former brewery-turned-arts institution
provides a suitable setting for Kuri’s appropriations of industrial
materials.

“Gabriel Kuri: sorted,
resorted” is on view at WIELS Contemporary Arts
Center, Avenue Van Volxem 354, 1190 Forest,
Belgium, September 6, 2019–January 1,
2020.

Lindsey Mendick and Paloma
Proudfoot at Ballon Rouge Collective

The previously nomadic Balon Rouge Club—which has popped up in
New York, Istanbul, and Amsterdam—has found a permanent home in
Brussels. Nevertheless, the gallery has kept true to its reputation
for always being just a little bit different from your typical
gallery or project space by handing the key over to the dynamic,
London-based Hannah Barry Gallery. Barry is presenting works
by the duo Lindsey Mendick and Paloma Proudfoot, showing under the
portmanteau PROUDICK.

The Royal College of Art graduates are offering an array of
large and small sculptures that are informed by their incredible
skills in ceramics. Called “Of all the things I’ve lost,” it is a
lively show, if a little too packed. The duo, described as working
with “an exultant and unforgiving feminism,” present a sometimes
gory, sometimes cutesy, sometimes erotic display of lost limbs,
iPhones, and souls in a show that explores the absent object and
its memory.

“PROUDICK: Of all the things
I’ve lost” is on view at Hannah Barry Gallery at
Ballon Rouge Collective, 2 Place du
Jardin aux Fleurs 1000 Brussels, Belgium, September 5–October
21, 2019.

Paul Thek at Jan
Mot

This is the first solo show in Brussels of the late artist and
painter Paul Thek, who died in New York in 1989 from an
AIDS-related illness. It is long overdue considering the time the
US artist spent abroad in Europe, a long visit that included a solo
show at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.

With its self-conscious title “I AM, AM I?” Jan Mot presents
small-format etchings that were discovered in the artist’s archive
after his death. Around a dozen of works from the 28-part series
are on view, including a few that were accidentally drawn by Thek
backwards, which is perhaps why the artist never made prints of
them. Several were made in Paris, France in 1975, and Thek brought
them back to the US and packed them away. The title of the show and
another work containing the mirrored words AVE EVA seem to refer
the artistic blunder.

Nevertheless, these posthumously-produced editions resonate
perhaps even more brightly in all their vulnerability. Their
cartoonish imagery references bible stories and folklore, as well
as the Tower of Babel and the character “Tarbaby,” both of which
frequently recurred in Thek’s work.

“Paul Thek’s: I AM, AM I?” are on view at Jan
Mot, Petit Sablon/Kleine Zavel 10, Brussels,
Belgium, September 5–October 26,
2019.

The post From Paul Thek’s Accidental Etchings to Gabriel
Kuri’s Cigarette Butts, Here Are 5 Must-See Shows in Brussels
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