Didier Vermeiren — Sculptures — photographies — La Maison Rouge — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 21 → September 23, 2012

In all his work, Didier Vermeiren (Brussels, 1951) questions the tradition of sculpture and its possibilities today. He belongs to a generation of artists who, since the 1970s and drawing on the legacy of conceptual art, minimalism and history, have been instrumental in redefining the dialectic of art.

While many of Didier Vermeiren’s sculptures make reference to works by other sculptors, they also refer back and forth to each other. A sculpture is always one stage in a continuity and a response to an earlier work. As such, they are all connected, and form a coherent and prolific whole. In each of his exhibitions, Didier Vermeiren establishes a dialogue between recent and older works, each time allowing new links to emerge between the different sculptures. Thus every exhibition looks both backwards and forwards.

Vermeiren rose to prominence in the early 1980s with works that consider the signification of sculptures by questioning the plinth on which they stand. The plinth’s importance as a pedestal has been gradually eroded over the course of the twentieth century. Whereas some artists, such as Brancusi, made it an integral part of their work, others refused this separation between work and floor. Modernism divested the plinth of its purpose. Didier Vermeiren’s response was to rethink the role of the plinth, and to transform it into an autonomous mass within physical space. The plinth is a base and a foundation; it can also exist for itself and of itself.

Some of these sculptures, all representative of Didier Vermeiren’s oeuvre, are being shown at la maison rouge. the artist has taken advantage of the layout of la maison rouge by choosing two groups of works for two galleries which face each other on separate levels. The nine large pieces which the artist will present in the upper gallery are his most recent work (2007-2010), shown for the first time in France. They will centre around two studies: Etude pour la Pierre and Etude pour l’Urne. The second gallery will show a group of seven plaster sculptures — what we might call his sculptures retournées or overturned sculptures (1995-1999) — and 32 black and white photographs, taken in the studio in 1998, of a work from the same period (Cariatide à la Pierre, 1997).