Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

    ENELNL

    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

    Paul De Vree

    Back
    (c)image: M HKA
    Revolutie, 1968
    Paul De Vree
    Print , 450 x 450 mm
    ink, paper

    From the portfolio Verbaal Gelaat, 1969

    Among the visual poems in which the limited typography of the typewriter has been relinquished in favour of a highly developed graphic elaboration of the text, one finds one of De Vree’s most famous poems, Revolutie (1968). The letters are arranged in a circle and each letter is halved. The inner half has been shifted slightly to the right in relation to the outer half. This displacement of the word image yields a distorted visual pattern, which, precisely through its disruptive character, summarises the essence of a revolution. Both the word and the concept (break, shift, rotation) are here turned into images. Ton Luiting and Wim Van Mulders consider Revolutie the quintessence of De Vree’s oeuvre. Van Mulders points to the meaning of revolution as the birth of something new and the need for the revolution to remain in perpetual movement. He thereby underlines the ‘(r)evolutionary’ aspect of De Vree’s oeuvre.

    Back