The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (commonly abbreviated as S.M.A.K., translated as City Museum for Contemporary Art) is a relatively new museum located in Ghent, Belgium, and is renowned both for its permanent collection (Art & Language, Karel Appel, Francis Bacon, Panamarenko, Andy Warhol, etc.) and for its provocative exhibitions. [1]
The new museum opened to the public on 7 May 1999. The collection concentrates on international developments in art after 1945, and was based upon works collected by the Contemporary Art Museum Association (created on 8 November 1957 at the instigation of Karel Geirlandt ) and the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst (set up in 1975 as the first Belgian museum devoted to contemporary art, housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, with Jan Hoet appointed as director).
After Jan Hoet retired from the museum on 1 December 2003, Peter Doroshenko was in charge. After a trial period of one year, he was dismissed. The dismissal of Doroshenko caused much commotion. Artists and curators, headed by Luc Tuymans, feared for the future and independence of the museum. A petition was handed to the Chairman of the Board of Directors; culture vessels Sas Van Rouveroij. The dismissal was not reversed, but there were some changes in the organizational structure of the museum. Thus, Jan Hoet gave up his seat on the board of directors.
Current directors are Philippe Van Cauteren (art director) and Philippe Vandenweghe (business director).
Ghent University is a public research university located in Ghent, Belgium.
Peter Doroshenko is the director at The Ukrainian Museum, New York, New York, United States.
Knight Jan Hoet was the Belgian founder of SMAK in Ghent, Belgium.
Michaël Borremans is a Belgian painter and filmmaker who lives and works in Ghent. His painting technique draws on 18th-century art, as well as the works of Édouard Manet and Degas. The artist also cites the Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez as an important influence. In recent years, he has been using photographs he has made himself or made-to-order sculptures as the basis for his paintings.
Mark Manders is a Dutch artist, currently living and working in Ronse, Belgium. His work consists mainly of installations, drawings and sculptures. He is probably best known for his large bronze figures that look like rough-hewn, wet or peeling clay. Typical of his work is also the arrangement of random objects, such as tables, chairs, light bulbs, blankets and dead animals.
Thierry De Cordier is a contemporary visual artist. He currently lives and works in the Alpujarras, Spain.
Danny Matthys is a Flemish - Belgian visual artist, which was originally known as conceptual artist of international reputation. In the beginning of his career in the 1960s, he was a pioneer in Polaroid art and Video art.
Niek Kemps is a Dutch visual artist and lives and works in Amsterdam and Wenduine, Belgium.
Hans Vandekerckhove is a Belgian painter, living and working in Ghent. From 1975 to 1997 Vandekerckhove studied Art History at University Ghent, where he wrote his graduation thesis on David Hockney.
The Mu.ZEE is a museum in Ostend, Belgium, specializing in Belgian art from 1830 onwards. It was created in 2008 by the fusion of the former Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst and the Museum voor Schone Kunsten Oostende, both located in Ostend. The museum has two dependencies, the Ensorhuis in Ostend, and the Permekemuseum in Jabbeke. Mu.ZEE is an abbreviation of "Kunstmuseum aan Zee".
Louis Van Lint was a Belgian painter, major figure of the Belgian post-war abstraction.
BiennaleOnline is an online exhibition of contemporary art. The exhibition aims to focus on the most promising emerging visual artists worldwide, presenting works in New Media, Installation, Traditional Media, Photography and Performance. These artists will come from Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and the Middle East, and have been selected by 29 leading international curators.
Han Schuil is a Dutch multimedia artist, who works in a Dutch tradition of compactness and tension in painting.
Koen van den Broek is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Antwerp and Seoul, South Korea.
Raúl Cordero is a Cuban born conceptual painter. First known as part of the 90s generation in Cuba, when he started exhibiting his work mostly in Europe and the United States of America. Cordero represents through his work the "other Cuban art." Far from the standards of the Cuban Revolution art, and without falling into topics of other artists from in and out of the island, Cordero samples pretexts whimsically obtained from various referential origins and shows us his work as a result of recycling, of a revival, creating a new reality that refers more to art than to any other apparent content.
Michael Ross is an American contemporary artist, known for his small-scale sculptures. Although Michael Ross has exhibited conceptually based works including performance, mail art, video, and audience participation projects, the last twenty years have seen the artist direct his focus toward small, precise wall mounted sculptures created from scraps, unidentifiable hardware and miscellaneous things. Michael Ross's earliest small-scale sculpture consisted of a single upright thimble containing the dust from several rooms of his home. A small work created by the artist in 1994 made a wry salute to large-scale minimal metal sculptures like those of Donald Judd. Over the years, Ross has also created numerous unique tiny sculptures inspired by the Japanese fairy tales of the writer Lafcadio Hearn. His focus on the minuscule has justly identified the artist as, "a true scholar of the tiny kingdom" and “a pioneer of the subversive small gesture”. Michael Ross received his BFA at The State University of New York, Buffalo and his MFA at Columbia University in New York, NY.
Wim Goes Architectuur is an architecture practice founded by Wim Goes in 1999. Next to his architecture practice, Wim Goes has published drawings and texts on architecture and is teaching at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture since 2005. He received his master's degree from Sint-Lucas School of Science & Arts in 1993 and attended the 2006 Glenn Murcutt International Master Class in Australia and the 2008 Master Class in New Zealand with Ian Athfield. He worked on construction sites and in workshops before establishing Wim Goes Architectuur.
Nicos Baikas is a Greek artist who lives and works in Athens. He started his art studies in 1967 at the Athens School of Fine Arts and later studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. He started exhibiting his works in the 1980s and achieved some notability in Germany after his participation in the Documenta 9 art exhibition, in 1992. His work is a synthesis of words and images, usually performed with pencil on paper in black and white.
Bart Cassiman (1961), is an international freelance-curator, art critic and editor, is an art historian and studied press- and communication sciences at the Ghent University (1979-1984).
Philippe Vandenberg (1952–2009) was a Belgian painter.
Media related to S.M.A.K. at Wikimedia Commons
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