Didier Vermeiren

Last updated
Didier Vermeiren
Didier Vermeiren, Adam, 1999 Tatemodern.jpg
Adam, Tate Modern Collection (1999).
Born (1951-07-10) 10 July 1951 (age 72)
Brussels
NationalityBelgian
Known for Sculpture, photography
Movement Minimalism, conceptual art

Didier Vermeiren (born 10 July 1951) is a Belgian sculptor.

Contents

His first works, in the 1970s, stood at the crossroads of conceptual art, minimal art and the tradition of modern sculpture. Afterwards, the photographical documentation of his own work became more and more significant, until it became an entire aspect of it, photographs and sculptures responding to each other and generating new works all the while.

Didier Vermeiren lives and work in Paris and Brussels. He has been teaching since 2002 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany and since 1991 at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (Netherlands). He is a member of the board of the Musée Rodin (Paris).

Work

In the late 1970s, he turned his attention to the question, essential in the history of modern sculpture, of the plinth, or base. [1] creating the « plinth sculptures » through which he was introduced to the international art scene, starting with a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, titled An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. [2]

Traditionally, the base was not considered to be part of the sculpture, but served to transport the sculpted figure from the "real" space into the artistic or monumental space. The function of the plinth as pedestal then gradually disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Whereas certain artists, like Brancusi, turned the plinth into an integral part of their work by incorporating it into the sculpture, others no longer wanted the sculpted object to be separated from the ground by this presentational element and chose to place the sculpture directly on the floor, on the same level as the spectator. [3] Modernism, in other words, made the plinth useless. Taking this development seriously, but wanting to think it through more rigorously, Vermeiren reevaluated the purpose of the plinth and turned it into an autonomous volume in the space: if the plinth is a base or a foundation, it can be displayed for its own sake and on its own merits, taking on the fate of a work of art. All that is left is the pure presence on the ground and its many sculptural possibilities. [4] This gave rise to an ongoing dialogue with space. Situating works in the space and reconfiguring the space in relation to these works became the purpose of every exhibition. For Vermeiren, space is not empty, but plastic, which is why he thinks of his works as hollowing it out and sculpting it. [5]

Sculpture's incorporation of the space — the entire space, including the firmament — constitutes one of the characteristic features of twentieth-century sculpture. Carl Andre, in dialogue with Brancusi's Endless Column , once stated that his sculptures, as horizontal, flat and low-lying as they are, nevertheless support "a column of air" on their entire surface area. This column can be pictured as extending "endlessly" above the works, or as bounded by the vault of heaven or that of a building. [6]

Beginning in the seventies, Vermeiren set out to explore this incorporation of space and the sculptural demarcation of pure presence on the ground. We might think here of his works consisting of an object made of solid and heavy material (a parallelipided of stone, plaster or iron) placed on an object of identical size but made of soft and light material (polyurethane foam), with one crushing the other in a demonstration of the weight of the work in every sculptural project. [7] Then, in a direct confrontation with the problem of the plinth — which is also the problem of tradition — Vermeiren began to exhibit « replicas [8]  » of plinths of sculptures by Rodin, Carpeaux, Chamberlain..., usually made from the same material (plaster, bronze, etc.) as the figures their originals supported in the museum. It was no longer space in general that was incorporated into the work, but the space of tradition — in a gesture of memory. [9]

The plinth for Vermeiren is thus not simply a "ready-made" or a found object, [10] but rather brings into play the very origin of the work of art. [11] In a truly plastic process, the artist reconfigures, reworks and "sculpts" the chosen volume using traditional techniques (such as modelling, moulding or assemblage) in order to accomplish the incorporation of space and presence into the work. To this end, a "plinth" can be posed in reverse on another one identical to it, or on its negative (its own mould), or even turned inside out like a glove with the armature on the outside.

Thus, if Vermeiren's sculptures often make references to other sculptures that belong to the history of his art, this approach only becomes meaningful to the extent that his pieces also refer back and forth to each other within his own body of work. A sculpture is always like a term in a sequence and forms a response to earlier works. In this sense, Vermeiren's work is also always a remembering of his work. Each of the artist's exhibition looks both backward and forward [12]

Collections

Vermeiren's works are part of several major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New-York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht.

Exhibitions

Skulpturenpark Walfrieden, Wuppertal, 2012 Vermeiren-Wuppertal.jpg
Skulpturenpark Walfrieden, Wuppertal, 2012

Group shows (selection)

Didier Vermeiren - Zeitlos, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 1988 Didier Vermeiren - Zeitlos, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 1988.jpg
Didier Vermeiren - Zeitlos, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 1988

Filmography

Publications

Construction de distance, ed. Frac Bretagne, Rennes, 2017 Construction de distance.jpg
Construction de distance, ed. Frac Bretagne, Rennes, 2017

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Bismuth</span> French artist and filmmaker

Pierre Bismuth is a French artist and filmmaker based in Brussels. His practice can be placed in the tradition of conceptual art and appropriation art. His work uses a variety of media and materials, including painting, sculpture, collage, video, architecture, performance, music, and film. He is best known for being among the authors of the story for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay alongside Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman. Bismuth made his directorial debut with the 2016 feature film Where is Rocky II?.

Laurent Pariente is a French sculptor

Fernand Toupin was a Québécois abstract painter best known as a first-generation member of the avant-garde movement known as Les Plasticiens. Like other members of the group, his shaped paintings drew upon the tradition of geometric abstraction, and he cited Mondrian as a forerunner. In 1959, Toupin began working with a more lyrical, though abstract, way of painting. The last decade of his career saw his return to geometric abstraction. Like Jean-Paul Mousseau, Toupin created works which lay outside the standard boundaries of art such as his stage sets for ballets.

Rémy Zaugg was a Swiss painter, primarily known as a conceptual artist. He played an important role as both a critic and observer of contemporary culture, especially with regards to the perception of space and architecture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William MacKendree</span> American artist

William MacKendree is an American artist. He was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1948. He studied Philosophy and Visual Arts at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Following the completion of his university degrees, he left the U.S. to live and work in Greece between 1975 and 1982.

Melik Ohanian is a French contemporary artist of Armenian origin. He lives and works in Paris and New York City. His work has been shown in many solo exhibitions including Galerie Chantal Crousel, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, South London Gallery in London, De Appel in Amsterdam, IAC in Villeurbanne, Yvon Lambert in New York, Museum in Progress in Vienna, and Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Csaky</span> French sculptor

Joseph Csaky was a Hungarian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, best known for his early participation in the Cubist movement as a sculptor. Csaky was one of the first sculptors in Paris to apply the principles of pictorial Cubism to his art. A pioneer of modern sculpture, Csaky is among the most important sculptors of the early 20th century. He was an active member of the Section d'Or group between 1911 and 1914, and closely associated with Crystal Cubism, Purism, De Stijl, Abstract art, and Art Deco throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Messagier</span> French artist (1920–1999)

Jean Messagier was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker and poet. Jean Messagier had his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Arc-en-Ciel in 1947. From 1945 to 1949 the artist worked under the influence of Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Paul Klee and François Desnoyer, his professor at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. Messagier again was revealed to the public at an exhibition organized by Charles Estienne at the Galerie de Babylone in 1952, entitled "La Nouvelle École de Paris". The following year, Messagier deliberately broke away from his expressionistic form of Post-Cubism; his inspirations now focused on Jean Fautrier and Pierre Tal-Coat to develop a personal vision in which he renders "light...approached abstractly." Jean Messagier is often associated with Lyrical abstraction, Tachisme, Nuagisme, Art informel and paysagisme abstrait, though the artist himself had never accepted any labels, and had always refused the distinction between abstraction and figuration. From 1962 until the year of his death Jean Messagier exhibited in France and abroad, taking part in some major international events as a representative of new trends in French painting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alain Kirili</span> French-American sculptor (1946–2021)

Alain Kirili was a French-American sculptor. He was recognized for his post-minimalist abstract sculptures in forged iron and his large-scale public sculptures. His work has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions in United States and Europe, and has received considerable critical interest from art historians, such as Thierry Dufrêne, Robert C. Morgan, Robert Rosenblum, and Kirk Varnedoe. Kirili lived and worked in Paris and New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Didier Ottinger</span> French museum curator, art critic and author

Didier Ottinger, born in Nancy in 1957, is a French museum curator, art critic and author. He is known for organizing exhibitions and publishing books on modern and contemporary painting. He is now assistant director of the Centre Pompidou at the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sara Holt</span> American sculptor and photographer (born 1946)

Sara Holt is an American sculptor and photographer. She is creating mainly in sculpture and photography and more recently in ceramics. She is one of the contemporary artists whose work helps to refine the field of creation situated within the boundaries of science and art.

Claude Garache is a French artist. He has worked in painting, sculpture, illustration and engraving. His principal subject is the female nude. Much of his work uses a single colour on a monochrome background, very often blood-red on white.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tania Mouraud</span> French artist

Tania Mouraud is a contemporary French video artist and photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hessie</span> Cuban textile artist

Carmen Lydia Đurić, known by her artist name Hessie, was a Cuban textile artist who lived in France from 1962 until her death. Her creative work was mainly focused on embroidery using fabrics, although she also used the technique of collage with waste materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Hérold</span> Romanian painter (1910–1987)

Jacques Hérold was a prominent surrealist painter born in Piatra Neamț, Romania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lise Gervais</span> Canadian painter and sculptor

Lise Gervais (1933–1998) was a Canadian abstract painter and sculptor. She was president of the Conseil des Artistes Peintres du Quebec in 1983 and 1984.

Edith Dekyndt is a visual artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hervé Télémaque</span> French painter (1937–2022)

Hervé Télémaque was a French painter of Haitian origin, associated with the surrealism and the narrative figuration movements. He lived and worked in Paris from 1961 on.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morice Lipsi</span> French sculptor

Morice Lipsi was a French sculptor of Polish descent. During the period following the Second World War he was one of the most important sculptors of monumental abstract stone sculptures.

Lionel Estève is a French artist sculptor recognized for his work grounded in geometric abstraction and kinetic art. His work deals with the boundaries of human perception and connection between man and nature. Since the late-1990s, his work has been exhibited widely, most notably at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and MOMA Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2020, Estève published his first autobiographical story entitled Mourir. Estève studied at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and Philologie Romane at the Free University of Brussels. He lives and works in Brussels and Southeastern France.

References

  1. This question was the subject of an exhibition at the musée Rodin, in 2005, that showed some Vermeiren's sculptures, see La Sculpture dans l'espace - Rodin, Brancusi, Giacometti, Bourgeois, Vermeiren, Musée Rodin, Paris, November 2005-February 2006
  2. Museum of Modern Art, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, p. 312-313.
  3. See Dominic Van Den Boogerd in « Caryatid by moonlight », in Didier Vermeiren: Collection de solides, Van Abbemuseum, exhibition catalogue, 1986 : « The modern sculpture of the twentieth century extricated itself from the tradition of the pedestal. That history is well-known. Rodin was the first to model his own bases for his figures; Brancusi treated the pedestal as an integral part of his work; and with Andre and Judd the pedestal was banished altogether »
  4. "If one thing is certain, it's the question of where a sculpture starts. It starts on the floor. It has no boundaries, in terms of height and width, but it does on the floor. That's the crucial point, the place where sculpture happens — right here on the floor", interview of the artist 123 plans sur la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren Archived June 10, 2018, at the Wayback Machine , réal. Elsa Cayo, 26 min, 1988. This interview is also available on the Tate Modern website, in Tate Papers n°8, Didier Vermeiren, Je travaille sur la présence
  5. "The actual material of the sculpture is the space. The space creates the sculpture and the sculpture creates the space", interview of the artist 123 plans sur la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren Archived June 10, 2018, at the Wayback Machine , réal. Elsa Cayo, 26 min, 1988
  6. "I don't think of them as being flat at all. I think, in a sense, that each piece supports a column of air that extends to the top of the atmosphere. They're zones. I hardly think of them as flat, any more than one would consider a country flat, because if you look at it on a map it appears flat", Phyllis Tuchman, "An Interview with Carl Andre", Artforum n°10 (june 1970), p. 60-61.
  7. "In the works with styrofoam the important thing is that the traditional relations between sculpture and plinth are switched; and you have to remember that in the traditional relationship the plinth is more solid than the sculpture standing on it. Here the opposite is the case", 123 plans sur la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren Archived June 10, 2018, at the Wayback Machine , réal. Elsa Cayo, 26 min, 1988
  8. Voir Michel Gauthier, « Transferts (sur les «répliques» de socles dans la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren) » in Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne n°47, p. 117-131, 1994
  9. "Vermeiren's work embody the memory of both Giacometti's Palace and Donatello's dancing children, of Carl Andre's floor pieces as well as the endless columns of Brancusi. For the sculptor material, says Vermeiren, is not plaster bronze or marble, but recollection", Dominic van den Boogerd, « Caryatid by moonlight », in Didier Vermeiren, Collection de Solides, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2003.
  10. "It is true that I make mine something that already exists, but I don't think that It can be seen as a ready-made. A plinth is something that already belongs to the art world. Whereas a ready-made is something that has been taken outside the art world and is now incorporated into it", interview of the artist in 123 plans sur la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren Archived June 10, 2018, at the Wayback Machine , réal. Elsa Cayo, 26 min, 1988
  11. « Before sculpture, ergo, there was sculpture. This is precisely the message of Vermeiren's work, who claims his anchorage in the history of an art whose innermost principle harbors a sort of perpetual echo (...) repetition, translation, are the very essence of the history of sculpture », Jean-Pierre Criqui, « Six Remarks on the Sculpture of Didier Vermeiren », in Didier Vermeiren, Centre d'art contemporain du Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Locminé, 1991, p. 12.
  12. "My sculptures refer to the work of other sculptors, but also to my own. That means there are backward glances from sculpture to sculpture. One sculpture alone can't exist. A single sculpture doesn't say anything yet. The works form a network, but they also work as individual articulations. If I make a sculpture, it's defined by the scultpure I made before; and it defines the sculpture I'll make afterwards. All sculptures constitute one large ensemble", 123 plans sur la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren Archived June 10, 2018, at the Wayback Machine , réal. Elsa Cayo, 26 min, 1988. A quote of the same statement is to be found in Erik Verhagen, « Endogenous / Exogenous: Didier Vermeiren's Dangling Signs », in Didier Vermeiren, Solides Géométriques - Vues d'Atelier, exhibition catalogue, Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 2005, p. 20. See Erik Verhagen, « Didier Vermeiren, Much More than a Minimalist », in artpress n°392, juin 2012, p. 48 : « For Vermeiren, the moment of exhibition is always synonymous with a present where the dynamics of looking forward and looking backward converge in a single movement, and where older pieces dialogue with and reveal themselves through newer work, which, furthermore, announces what will probably come next»
  13. "Vermeiren, Didier : 123 plans sur la sculpture de Didier Vermeiren - Le Centre du Film sur l'Art". centredufilmsurlart.com. Retrieved 1 March 2017..

Bibliography