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Gert Verhoeven

09.22.06 - 10.15.06
Installation — Hôtel-Dieu

Gert Verhoeven, exhibition view, Hôtel Dieu, Toulouse, 2006

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

Gert Verhoeven, exhibition view, Hôtel Dieu, Toulouse, 2006

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

Born in 1964 in Louvain (Belgium), he lives in Brussels.

 

At the hub of Gert Verhoeven's artistic preoccupations lies formlessness. He is not afraid of giving his works a childish, not to say regressive character, and he uses obscenity as a weapon for releasing a simultaneously creative and destructive energy. The target of his assaults is the art world as a system, and art history, seen as an incestuous family affair. He likes to quote this sentence uttered by his compatriot Marcel Broodthaers: “Magritte is a father who eats his children”. He rejects the structure-giving and castrating figures of law and authority. His drawings, sculptures and videos involve the organic, the vegetal, and the corporeal, everything which, for him, is “not formed, not organized, not stratified”. The grotesque is also present in his works, but a grotesque permeated by a conceptual approach which also questions the raw material of his ideas.