The exhibitions Urgent Conversations: Athens–Antwerp and Urgent Conversations: Antwerp – Athens are a collaboration between EMST and M HKA, a theoretical and visual dialogue, based on works from the collections of both museums, which includes more than 70 works structured in 22 topics.   

28.04.2017 - 07.01.2018        

M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen - Leuvenstraat 32, 2000 Antwerpen

EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Kallirrois Avenue & Amvr. Frantzi Str., Athens 11743

Hugo Roelandt

(c)Estate Hugo Roelandt
Zonder titel / Untitled, Cactus, 1992-2016
Installation

During his color experiments Hugo Roelandt reworked some of his earliest work. Among them a series of six colored self-portraits he had first shown in 1973 during an exhibition by former students of the Academy of Aalst. In 1993 he reworked these works and made them into large photo’s glued on aluminium plates which, together with a monochrome black photo and a blank aluminium plate on which at the bottom only his signature was engraved (it was at the same time projected as a slide), were conceived as an ‘aluminium book’. He showed the pages in the Antwerp Academy as his graduation project at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts HISK. Together with his favourite cactus plant (lit by a spot) and a large photo of a green elephant – a remembrance of his travelling to India when he was in his twenties and visiting the sacred Sikh shrine at Amritsar.