EMINENT DOMAINS (proper names)

+

OO Inflatables

6 March - 11 April 2015

EMINENT DOMAINS (proper names), a group exhibition organized by gallery artist Willem Oorebeek, features works by Doug Ashford, Aglaia Konrad, and Glen Rubsamen. The exhibition also hosts a separate group show entitled OO Inflatables with works by Graham Anderson, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Jana Euler, Suchan Kinoshita, Jochen Lempert, Megan Marrin, Oorebeek/Thompson, and Mitja Tušek. At its conception, curator Willem Oorebeek explored his fascination with the autobiographical-oriented interest in images and image making by intuitively selecting artists from his own address book. Assigning a space to each artist, Oorebeek facilitates absolute liberty of action and decision in their individual presentations.

EMINENT DOMAINS (proper names) + OO Inflatables address the mechanisms and hierarchies of the art world: absence, eminence, and protégés, all of which are inclusive in the enterprise of presentation. The exhibition titles broadly refer to the infinite perspectives from which we look at art. The traditional gallery space has been described as a hermetic space, within which the art viewing experience may be controlled to a degree. Oorebeek endeavors in his curatorial exercise to allow the participant to (or not to) engage with the art in a potentially open structure without being separated by (white) space that isolates the works from each other. Oorebeek describes the domain as the space where art is happening, as well as the space occupied by the act of its making. Within the context of this exhibition, eminence is fundamentally generated by the artist’s activity – awareness, intention, and gesture – and is not based on the (external) judgments of its reception in the art world.

Oorebeek reiterates his role as curator-as-artist by installing in the central gallery space a selection of pages from his book Vertikal Klub (2014) that are enlarged to human-scale figures to symbolically host the participating artist with a figure, and to guide the visitor through the domains by a loosely reconstructive system.

Willem Oorebeek was born in Rotterdam in 1953 and lives and works in Brussels. His conceptual works, installations, and book projects have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including unExhibit, Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011), MONOLITH, Once or Many, Culturgest, Lisbon (2008); bigger, higher, leader!, S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2006); (with Joëlle Tuerlinckx) BILD, oder MIT DEM FUSS IN DER REALITÄT, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2004); and MONOLITH, lettered rock; Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1994). Oorebeek and Aernout Mik co-designed the Dutch pavilion for the 47th Venice Biennial (1997). He has also published numerous artist’s books, including Met Zonder KOP (Ghent 2005) and BILD, oder MIT DEM FUSS IN DER REALITÄT (Karlsruhe 2004). Willem Oorebeek was a lecturer at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, at "de Ateliers" in Amsterdam and the Hochschule der Künste in Hamburg. He currently coordinates the Residency Program at the Wiels, Contemporary Art Center, Brussels.