2016-2017

15 November until 2 April 2017

ITINERIS MAGNA

For its winter exhibition Itineris Magna, the Verbeke Foundation is pleased to invite you for a journey through the works of Willem Buijs (NL, 1937-2007), Oey Tjeng Sit (NL, 1917-1987), Wim Taciturn (BE 1959 -2014) and Ossip (NL, 1952). The exhibition can be seen from 13 November 2016 till 2 April 2017.

WILLEM BUIJS   NL, °1937-2007
Itineris Magna, the great journey; here is a term that perfectly applies to the work of Willem Buijs. Few artists have undertaken such a journey in pursuit of their ideas. A travel around the world, side by side with his companion Truus van den Boezem, always searching for something. Searching for the Venus of Milo’s arms in Greece in 1979; searching for the total solar eclipse in Papua New Guinea in 1984; searching for the illustrious men in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; searching for Highway 183 in the United States in 1996, etc. Willem Buijs documented his travels, his quests, with hundreds of photographs, texts and drawings. The artist makes us share his astonishments, he leads and fixes our eyes on what attracted his attention. His works are almost always in series, he awakens our interest with a process of extension, repetition, exhaustion of the subject.

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OEY TJENG SIT    ID °1917- NL, 1987
We are pleased to present to the public, and for the first time in over ten years, a selection of works from Oey Tjeng Sit. A self-taught artist, a pharmacist by trade, a singular and prominent figure in the Amsterdam art scene of the seventies. Oey used many artistic means: drawing, collage, assemblage, printmaking, publishing, performance, etc. In spite of the diversity of techniques that he used, works of such consistency are rare. A work primarily dominated by one ‘palette’: black of the India ink, turquoise blue of the Gauloises cigarettes packs, brown of the kraft paper and above all, the only temporal element, the newsprint paper. Oey said that he was looking for ‘shapes able to extend the life of the newspaper’, using the ephemeral, the anecdotal to make it essential and timeless. In Oey Tjeng Sit’s opinion, fashionable artists are the victims of good taste. He himself had the intelligence and good taste never to be fashionable, which makes that at the dawn of the centennial of his birth, the lightness, strength and poetry of his images come to us in their full part, all fresh, intact.
oeytjengsit.com

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WIM TACITURN   BE, °1959-2014
André Stas, a major figure of Belgian collage, said about him: “Wim had a keen sense of layout and did not care about unnecessary additions, hitting the mark with an almost scientific economy of means. Having practiced this form of art (minor, perhaps, but much more difficult than it seems) for half a century, I now come to recognize the quality of a fellow artist’s images, which is blindingly obvious when it comes to Wim.” Wim Taciturn’s collages talk about the consumer society, about religion, about war, about love. It is a man’s view on his contemporaries and on the world surrounding him. Wim Taciturn had no basic material of choice, cutting antique prints as well as advertising magazines. This is what makes the richness of his work, the diversity of its components and the precision of the one who assembles them.
On the occasion of this retrospective, the Verbeke Foundation published a book on the work of the artist: Wim Taciturn 100% Collages
wimtaciturn.be

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OSSIP   NL, °1952
Today, the Dutch artist Ossip is best known for his mobile assemblages made from images taken from medical books and old newspapers. Although some of these works are included in the exhibition at the Verbeke Foundation, it is mainly older and rarely shown works that we have chosen to highlight. A series of minimalist collages/paintings, reflecting the taste of the artist for the game of balance between form and colour; but also a series of drawings, collages and small cardboard sculptures, a genuine cast of characters in bright colours that tell us a story which we are free to invent. There is something of the spontaneity of Art Brut in these early works; a form of art of which Jean Dubuffet said that it made us witness “the artistic operation in its pure, raw state, totally reinvented from all its phases by its author, solely from his own impulses”.
ossip-artist.com

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ALSO ON VIEW
new works of Mandy den Elzen and Jeroen van Loon.
Due to the huge succes of the previous exhibition a selection of works of Zoro Feigl and Theo Jansen will remain on display during the forthcoming months.

RELEASE OF NEW BOOKS
Zoro Feigl The Mechanics
Wim Taciturn 100% Collages

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