05 May 2010

Edith Dekyndt & Rik Moens at KIOSK

From 2006 on, KIOSK has been organizing a changing exhibition program by both emerging and established artists. KIOSK started in a small glass pavilion and moved in February 2010 to its definite and larger gallery space. This venue is located in the former anatomical theatre of Cloquet Insitute, a renovated historical building on the Bijloke site in Ghent. KIOSK mainly focuses on monographic presentations of contemporary artists. This starting point will be translated in joint presentations in which specific characteristics of the artist and his work, like the aspect of research get particular attention.

The second exhibition in the new location shows work of Edith Dekyndt (B) and Rik Moens (B), two artists that share a fascination for the experiment and the proces, both artists integrate the aspect of coincidence in their actual physical form.

Edith Dekyndt (°1960, Ypres) lives and works in Tournai. She is at this moment seen as one of the most important artists of Belgium's French-speaking community. Edith Dekyndt's work is characterized by a minimal, aesthetic visual language. In video works, sound works, installations and sculptures, she explores physical phenomena (including soundwaves and light), manipulates invisible elements (dust and magnetic particles) and records ephemeral events. The artist attempts to sensitize the individual as a 'viewer' by sharpening our sense of perception. Edith Dekyndt's 'Get Out of My Cloud' exhibition includes a new installation, specially created for KIOSK's central hemicycle space, 'Carousel'. This installation gets form throughout image, text and sound.

Rik Moens (°1969, Ninove) is an artist who repeatedly seeks ways to test the limits of his medium, without repudiating painting tradition. As a painter, Moens continually questions the conventions and the limitations of the medium, so that such fundamental cornerstones as format, medium, background, signature, texture and colour are repeatedly examined in depth. At KIOSK, under the title, 'Proposal of the Props', Rik Moens presents a recent series of paintings that have never before been exhibited. Each of these works exerts its strong physical presence into the space. This is not so much due to their monumentality as to their specific evolution, whereby in almost ritual fashion, they are built up, layer upon layer: paintings as the performative carriers of an extremely conscientious process of creation, which sometimes takes months to complete.

KIOSK is initiated by non-profit organization Kunstensite (KuS) in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) at the University College Ghent, with the support of the Flemish Authorities and the city of Ghent.