18 Apr 2011

Jan De Cock and Derek Sullivan exhibitions open at KIOSK

With Jan De Cock and Derek Sullivan, KIOSK has invited two artists who examine the history of contemporary art through their works. Both artists suggest that the interpretation of this history and its visual heritage is not a self-contained narrative, but always contains a new proposition.

Jan De Cock (Brussels, 1979) garnered fame with his 'Denkmal': monuments, temporary installations made of wooden modules and photographic images that subtly integrate with the architectural and spatial context of their specific location. De Cock lets his interdisciplinary work engage in a dialogue with art-historical, architectural and cinematographical references, leading the visitor through a rhythmic course of repetition, linearity, fragmentation and perspective.

'Improvise and Overcome' is the title De Cock chose for his creation for the central round space of the KIOSK gallery, where he has installed an 'infini'. This freestanding structure refers to the nineteenth-century panorama. The installation functions as a support for a series of two-dimensional interventions and a new sculpture.

Derek Sullivan (Toronto, 1976) makes drawings, gouaches and sculptural work in which he combines the visual aesthetics of American geometric abstraction, modernist design and graphic art with shapes and forms borrowed from the realm of conceptual art.
Sullivan's characteristic large-format monochrome prints function as a backdrop for drawings and gouaches that combine geometric patterns and textual elements. Fascinated by artist's books, Sullivan regularly publishes work, making ample use of the possibilities of print-on-demand.

'Young Americans', the title of his KIOSK show, refers to the exhibition catalogues the New York MoMA published during the 1950s, an age where the interest for contemporary American art peaked. Fragments from these catalogues are being reproduced as posters, and combine with drawings and the fan-shaped architecture of the KIOSK cabinet rooms to make up separate pages of an imaginary book.