06 Apr 2011

The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing at NOMAD Gallery Brussels

Beginning on April 2nd, NOMAD Gallery will be hosting the exhibit The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing, featuring Belgian artist Gérald Dederen and South African photographer Gordon Clark. The works of these two artists are distinct and unique, but are similar in that they both provoke a questioning of reality and normality. These characteristics make The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing a great experience for the viewer.

Gérald Dederen, a native of Verviers, specializes in working with different media to create, whether they are sculptures or drawings, works that reveal the media and their essences. In his work, Dederen strives to capture gestures and movements while at the same time showing to the viewer the process by which he achieves these goals. Dederen uses the space around his medium to guide his creation; the medium and its density have an active part in the creation of his work. For this exhibition, Dederen makes use of Chinese ink to create massive drawings that showcase his dedication to the process of creation and his medium. In showing the process of addition or subtraction from a medium, Dederen invites the viewer to observe a medium as being dynamic and complex rather than a static element of its environment.

South African photographer Gordon Clark also provides the viewers of his work with an intense and distinctive experience. A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, Clark had had several successful shows and studied film making before undertaking the project 'WHO AM I? TRANSGRESSIONS' with Leon Botha, artist and one of the world's oldest survivors of the Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS). Clark took an innovative approach to this project by using analogue photography to shoot Botha in an alternative, but no less tangible, reality. This alternative reality encourages the viewer to question the relationship between what Botha calls, the 'inner' and 'outer' worlds, between individual identity and perceived reality.

The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing invites the viewer to perceive art in a new way, by considering the channels through which works are created and not just the work itself. The passionate and painstaking work of Dederen and the thought-provoking and spiritual work of Clark illustrate issues of life, death, and what is incomprehensible at first glance.