“FARBE, BILD, RAUM”
Bart van der Leck im Dialog, Insel Hombroich, Neuss
opening 26May 2023
“Stayin’ Alive”
Discover the Collections, Musée d’art de la Province Hainaut
until 23April 2023
Small Night, Dublin
Small Night edition, screenprint. With contributions by: Adrian Piper, Erik van Lieshout, Orla Barry, Tony Cokes, Paul Roy and Cesar van Pinsett.
Launch on 3rd May 2023 at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Thank you Laura Fitzgerald and James Merrigan.
“My Last Will”, Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz, Chemnitz
“My Last Will” takes both the form of a publication and a groupshow, organized an d curated by M+M (Weis/De Mattia). For “My Last Will” Erik van Lieshout has been commissioned to make a new video work. The exhibition will be on from 2 July 2023 until 1 October 2023. In 2024 the same exhibition will take place in Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg from 24May 2024 until 8September 2024.
“Ridiculously Yours?! Art, Akwardness and Enthusiasm”, Deichtorhallen – Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg
13May – 27August 2023, groupshow
“Ridiculously Yours?! Art, Akwardness and Enthusiasm”, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn
Until 9 April, 2023, groupshow
“Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian and The Consequences”, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
11March – 16July 2023, groupshow
“René Daniëls” at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin 4March – 15April 2023
Galerie Gudio W. Baudach is pleased to present its fifth solo exhibition with works by Erik van Lieshout.
René Daniëls (born 1950 in Eindhoven), the main figure in Van Lieshout’s film, is one of the best-known Dutch painters of the late twentieth century. In the early 1980s, he gave the medium, which was already considered anachronistic by many at the time, a new relevance by combining color, figuration, abstraction as well as language poetry – inspired by René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers, among others – to create a contemporary art in the spirit of post-punk, thus having a lasting influence on the further development of painting, not only in the Netherlands.
But just as quickly as his work gained international attention, he and his career were abruptly thrown off course in 1987, when Daniëls suffered a serious stroke from which he never really recovered. René Daniëls’ health is still severely affected by the consequences. Nevertheless, he resumed painting already years ago. The works created since then have a quality all of their own, but are very different from the paintings which have maintained René Daniëls’ fame since the 1980s.
When Daniëls was awarded a lifetime achievement prize at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in the summer of 2019, Van Lieshout, who was present at the ceremony, came up with the idea of making a film about him. The two had met a few times before in an art context, but without knowing each other any better. On the basis of Daniëls’ agreement, an intimate, equally sensitive and thoroughly cheerful artists’ portrait of a special kind was created in the course of the following year. René Daniëls is a film that questions what it means to be an artist and at the same time tells of the attempt to enter into dialogue with a fellow human being for whom normal conversation is impossible and for whom, apart from curt yes and no answers, facial expressions alone allow conclusions to be drawn about his thoughts. As Van Lieshout shows us, Daniëls’ daily routine is shaped by his current artistic practice and by the presence of Marleen Gijsen, his girlfriend in his teenage days, who has been looking after the artist since his stroke and also manages his work. Above all, however, the film tells of Van Lieshout’s persistent efforts to reach a direct personal exchange, including not least questions about art and painting, with René Daniëls, who is hardly able (and perhaps not particularly willing) to communicate.
In addition to the almost 50-minute film, which is shown as a wall-sized projection in a cinema atmosphere, the exhibited works on paper and canvas, all of which were created during and after the shooting, appear as equivalent, albeit formally different results of Van Lieshout’s engagement with René Daniëls. On view are portraits based on film stills as well as appropriations of individual early works in the form of Van Lieshout-typical collages and paintings, i.e. pictorial approaches to the person of René Daniëls on the one hand, and decisively set reinterpretations of moments of his painterly oeuvre on the other.
