Bernd Lohaus: The Way Things Settle (curated by Brenda Guesnet)

Bernd Lohaus (1940-2010) was an artist who worked in sculpture, painting and drawing. He was born in Düsseldorf, where he first studied classical sculpture and later became a student of Joseph Beuys. In the mid 1960’s, he moved to Antwerp, where he founded the ‘Wide White Space’ gallery with his wife, Anny De Decker, and brought the international avant-garde to Belgium while continuing to develop his own artistic practice. From the 1970’s onwards, he focused more intensely on his art, gradually establishing himself as an influential artist of his generation within the international movements of social sculpture, Fluxus and Arte Povera. 

This posthumous exhibition centres on a series of action paintings from the 1970’s, for which the artist thrust handfuls of pure pigment against the corners of his studio in the Verbondstraat in Antwerp, leaving behind explosive bursts of colour that transformed the space into a three-dimensional canvas. Three of these works, realised in the primary colours of blue, yellow and red, are reenacted for the exhibition, the loose powder resting on the walls and floor of the gallery. These works can never be realised in the same way twice, and their re-staging intends to bring out aspects of unpredictability and vulnerability in Lohaus’ diverse oeuvre. The three in situ works are shown alongside works on canvas from the same period.