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Artist Exhibitions:
'Ruins for the future', 1th
september- 6th january 2004,
Arequipa, Peru
'Look at Me' , 1th
february - 9th march 2003 ,
FRAME Contemporary Projects,
Brussel, Belgium
'For Sale' , 19th
january – 9 th march 2003 ,
RAM Foundation, Rotterdam, The
Netherlands
· Project with unemployed
foreign women in training
centre, 2002 –2003 Genk (B)
· Bordello...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Target Foundation, Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
0031102339939 e-mail
webmaster@targetfound.nl
Ram Gallery/Foundation,
Blekerstraat 10, Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
FRAME Contemporary Projects,
Brussels, Belgium
...
Further Information
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Artist Reviews:
A cut-and-paste festival
'Ruins of the Future,' a
collection of contemporary
art, is billed as a Peruvian
international exhibition. But
don't buy a plane ticket -- it
only exists online.
By Suzanne Muchnic, Times
Staff Writer
This dusty commercial center
of southern Peru may be
clogged with traffic ...
Further Information
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Collections:
Private and public
collections, Holland, Belgium,
France, Italy and US...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Pierre Mertens
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During the past two decades Pierre Mertens (1953, Antwerp, Belgium) has been creating works of art in different materials, disciplines, dimensions and formats. He did not do this to experiment. Influenced by each particular circumstance he searched for the right approach, format and discipline, all of which contributed to context.
This resulted in a pictorial language which is stratified, diverse and sometimes playful. His work is difficult to classify. If a suitable label or art category is found, he will retaliate in his next work of art. Always looking for new images and challenges, he creates stratified and complex work, but due to the context in which he is working, these images are clear and readable.
He has made the gap between Art and Society his workplace. He considers what he can add to the habitat of ordinary people. He gets to know each situation where he wants to develop a project. With a strong personal involvement he creates and presents images in the very environment that he has explored. He uses materials, objects and symbols that have relevance in this context.
He calls this ‘contextual art’.
This is the way Pierre Mertens exhibited with an Alzheimer patient in a retirement home, in the problem areas of the Antwerp suburb Borgerhout and the courthouse in Cambrai (F).
His last exhibition of the nineties (1991) was in an art gallery , Gallery 121, in Antwerp. He transformed the gallery into an aquarium by sticking fish on the windows overlooking the street. In 1993 he was asked to exhibit at an art centre. When he suggested transforming the centre back to its previous use as a garage- to which he proposed adding installations in the street, the exhibition was cancelled.
Art lovers who wanted to see his art had to go to those locations where his work was originally created.
Pierre Mertens asked himself the question “ how much influence does the context have in the perception of a work of art”. He adapted the same work in several different contexts and then evaluated what effect these various places had on viewers’ perceptions of the exhibit.
At the Plantijn College he wrote on a white wall ‘Look at Me’ in Braille and he repeated this work in glass on the window of a brothel and later on the window of the FRAME gallery in Brussels. He also suggested writing “La parole” in Braille on a wall of a Protestant church in Lille (F).
Fascinated by the opportunities presented by the Internet medium, Pierre Mertens included this virtual space in the further development of his art. The first digital project was in 2000 when he was asked to make use of a college intranet for an art integration project. For this project he did not opt for a striking centrally located physical sculpture, but developed a peripheral circuit of 12 artistic presentations which took more than a year to prepare and finalise. A public chat box serves as billboard and forms one of the heterogeneous parts of a subtle network of meanings.
Followed by ‘For Sale’( Rotterdam 2003) during which Pierre Mertens assumed the role of a real estate agent selling all museums world wide. He created a virtual environment where museums are sold in exchange for contextual art, art integration and art projects on location. This real estate and commercial property project saw its final development in the RAM Foundation, on the street, in the newspapers and still continues on the internet. On his website www.pierremertens.be he shows the new (virtual) destinations - famous museums received world wide. Guggenheim Bilbao became an IKEA and the Prado in Madrid a ABN/AMRO-bank.
In his latest art project ‘Ruins of the future’, he becomes a curator, the curator/artist creating the entire virtual exhibition in a Latin American country using the freedom of internet.
In the light of globalisation, the incestuous Western dominated art scene looked at the last two Documenta’s and the 2003 Biennial of Venice to review art of remote areas and developing countries. Pierre Mertens sees this as a self criticism of the art scene, seeking more art which is connected to life. African documentaries were presented as art in the western art context. A continuous flow of criticism from artists with regard to these exhibition concepts is that they simply illustrate the curator's ideas. By putting himself in the position of the curator and artist he questions the relationship between both.
Through his contextual approach of the past 15 years, Pierre Mertens creates art in these remote areas. With ‘Ruins of the Future’ (virtual) and the ‘Tingatinga project’ in Tanzania (physically) he creates contemporary art in developing countries. Not in museums or Biennial, but in places where people live and work. This is his workplace. Museums can only show the residue
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