04 Feb 2020

Philippe Van Snick - 'Territorium' at KIOSK

KIOSK presents 'Territorium' by Philippe Van Snick (1946-2019) an exhibition that can be regarded as an homage to the recently deceased artist whose work made an important contribution to artistic developments in Belgium. The show grew out of an intense dialogue with the artist, his family, KASK teacher Gert Robijns and his students of installation art, and Wim Waelput, curator and director of KIOSK.

The collaboration with KIOSK started in 2016, when Van Snick and four other artists were selected to present a proposal for the Belgian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Although 'Territorium', the proposal submitted by Van Snick and Waelput was eventually not selected, it did become the blueprint for the current exhibition. The proposal included a unique synthesis of Van Snick's fifty-year-old artistic practice. It contained all his characteristic elements — including, for instance, the systematic colour and formal principles, and a minimal, abstract visual language — in a way that emphatically responded to the pavilion's architecture. In close deliberation, an appropriate 'transfer' of form and content to the KIOSK space was developed.

In 'Territorium', the painted image develops its meaning in relationship with the architectural context and the visitor's physical experience of space. The exhibition space will be filled with sculptural work, painting, and a monumental architectural installation in the central dome room. The construction is called 'Dorp' ('Village') and consists of six separate wooden modules, functioning as a single monumental spatial canvas, painted with Van Snick's characteristic duos of colour fields.

As such, the exhibition reveals itself as a total installation that explores the material and spatial boundaries of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Van Snick invites visitors to walk this spatial landscape of form and colour, tactility and atmosphere, and to give themselves over to the experience.