Verhoeven, Gert

1964 Leuven (Belgium). Lives and works in Brussels.

Gert Verhoeven employs various media including drawings, sculptures, videos and installations. In an often ironic and surrealist way, his meta-communicative work investigates the way objects are classified and how their value is determined within various systems. Object-like works by artists, just like any other products, end up in a socio-economic reality. There the work acquires a value: what is good is translated in the market into the language of money, a semiology that carries within itself social, exchange-based variables. Money determines, for example, the status of a work, a quantity that in its turn is connected with existing power relations. This process of transformation is what interests Gert Verhoeven, as can be seen in his video pieces The Blob (2001) and Bustutai (2003), in which he documents dozens of Japanese-Americans competing for the biggest pumpkin. We see the actors bringing their pumpkins in pick-up trucks and proudly displaying their wares in marquees. Although there is a highly folkloric, almost carnivalesque aspect to this, the characters in The Blob and in Bustutai behave very seriously, almost in a deadpan way. They zealously compete for the prize for the biggest and heaviest pumpkin and they don’t stop going on about the grotesque eloquence of their swollen creatures and their equally conceited actions. Here they are more concerned with the form rather than the content: nothing is said, for example, about how the pumpkins taste. With a relativising dose of tongue-in-cheek, Verhoeven draws a parallel between the pumpkin competition and reality: the contest is transferred to the socio-economic system within which all goods - and thus art too - are traded. Both The Blob as well as Bustutai are allegorical explorations of the conflict artists experience with the inhibiting force of cynical reality. Within the contemporary art market, after all, the artist is expected to supply the most beautiful or the greatest, in short the ’most special’, work of art, while taking into account a forest of variables including, for example, the compelling heritage of art history.

In other works Gert Verhoeven likewise explores the position that an artist can assume with his works in relation to the world of art and the social environment. This aspiration is sometimes deliberately an inch thick, as in a series of drawings gathered under the heading New Feet (2002) in which he treats existing, older works on paper by each time placing an aestheticised print of his feet onto them. With the entirety of his fragile drawings, plaster sculptures and the video PAPA M’A brought together under the name Autolapsus (1998), he had his eye in a playful and once again ironic way on the world of pathology. For Verhoeven, the superficial layers of these works merely represent an alibi for expressing his most important concern: an explicit resistance against the compelling cult of the object.

Solo exhibitions:
2005: ’Gert Verhoeven. Cultura Incesto’, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B) 2003: ’Focus 2 - Gert Verhoeven Early Work’, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (B) - ’Gert Verhoeven. The Blob / Bustutai’, Argos, Brussels (B) -’Gert Verhoeven. New Feet. Works on Paper’, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B) 2002 : Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B) 2001: ’Gert Verhoeven. The Blob’, Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels (B) 2000: Christine Burgin Gallery, New York (USA) - Galerie Nelson, Paris (F) 1999: Galerie Nelson, Paris (F) - Galleria Gianluca Collica, Catania (I) 1998: ’Auto-Mio in Auto-MUHKA’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) - ’Gert Verhoeven. Autolapsus’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) - Sint-Lukasgalerij, Brussels (B) 1997: ’Untitled’, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B) 1996: ’Copy-Copy’, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B) - Roomade, Brussels (B)

Group exhibitions:
2006: MUHKA toont collectiepresentatie XIV’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) 2005: ’OFF-KEY’ , Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (CH) 2004: ’Working Ethics (from a certain Flanders), Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna (A) - ’Zie Tekening. Tekeningen uit de museumcollectie. Tekeningen van... Functionele tekeningen en andere...’, Stedelijk Museum Wuyts-Van Campen & Baron Caroly’, Lier (B) 2003: ’Once upon a time... Een blik op de kunst in België in de jaren ’90’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) - ’MUHKA de collectie... Een keuze met o.m..’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) - ’A-Prior : Benefiet’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) 2002: 25th Biennial of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo (BR) - ’Paramount Basics’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) - ’The Object Sculpture’, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (UK) 2001: ’De spiegel van het verlangen. Hedendaagse kunst uit Zuid-West-Vlaams privé-bezit’, Broelmuseum, Kortrijk (B) 2000: ’Low Video’, Galerie Veridata, Chicago (USA) - ’The persistence of painting. Reflexive Figurations’, Galerie Ferdinand Van Dieten-d’Eendt, Amsterdam (NL) - Galleria Gianluca Collica, Catania (I) - ’Clockwork 2000, national and international program 1999-2000’, PS1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York (USA) - Open Days at PS1, PS1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York (USA) 1999: ’Trouble Spot Painting’, ICC, Antwerpen (B) - ’La Consolation. Een keuze uit de verzameling van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap’, Centre National d’Art Contemporain ’Le Magasin’, Grenoble (F) - ’Sympathikus. Einblicke in das vegetative Nervensystem der Kunst von heute’, Städisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (D) 1998: ’Anti-Chambres’, Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels (B) - ’Two hours wide and two hours long. Through Art and Society. The Fascinating Faces of Flanders’, Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon (P) - ’Raconte moi une histoire : la narration dans la peinture et la photographie contemporaines’, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble (F) - ’Selections Fall ’98’, The Drawing Center, New York (USA) 1997: ’City Pity’, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B) - ’Speelhoven ’97’, Aarschot (B) - ’...pica en Flandes’, Capella de l’antic Hospital, Barcelona (E) - ’Maakt Kunst Staat?’, Provinciaal Centrum voor Beeldende Kunsten, Hasselt (B) - ’Grafische prenten uitgegeven door Yves Gevaert’, Yves Gevaert, Brussels (B) 1996: ’Kunstwerken verworven door de Vlaamse Gemeenschap in 1994-1995’, MUHKA, Antwerpen (B) 1995: Galerie Nelson, Paris (F) - East International Award Norwich, Norwich (UK) - ’Nu’95’, Prijs Belgische schilderkunst, Kalmthout (B) 1994: Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge/Prijs Jonge Belgische Schilderkunst, Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels (B) - ’Untitled’, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels (B)