This is a small retrospective of Brussels -based, Swiss artist BERNARD VOÏTA (born 1960 in Cully, CH). It features sculptures and photographs covering 30 years of his practice. The artist moved to Brussels in the late 1980s and has kept a studio here ever since, occupying the last floor of a town house he rebuilt with his late partner. This exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of his work in the city.
In Ancient Greek temples, Adyton was a restricted room, a closed off space that nonetheless contained a cult image of what was worshiped. This space was represented only in the narratives around it, thought in and out of the temple; it existed in the mind of those who never saw it. Adyton , the title of this exhibition, hints at Voïta’s interest in the ways mental and physical spaces merge.
Voïta’s photographs are images of physical objects he sets up in his studio. As flat representations, they depart from their subject: One instead sees a camera, a building, a straight cut, a geometrical shape. They evoke a process of composition that gets illustrated in sculpture. Picture planes literally break in Voïta’s movable objects, which change two things at once: themselves and the space that contains them. It is as though photography told the artist what to sculpt.
The architectural models and the cardboard works are personal takes on the broad conception of space. Voïta replicates the door of the gallery, opening a passage that leads nowhere physically but elsewhere mentally. He creates unusual spaces. For example, in the model of a public urinal where one cannot come in or out, or in a cardboard cage that opens only if ripped apart.
BERNARD VOÏTA (b. 1960, Switzerland) lives and works in Brussels. A selection of his museum exhibitions includes Fotomuseum Winterthur, CH (2024), Kunstmuseum Solothurn, CH (2018), Centre Art Contemporain, Yverdon-les-Bains, FR (2014), Cultuurcentrum Strombeek Grimbergen, BE (2012), Culturgest Lisbon (2011), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, CH (2005), Les Halles, Porrentruy, CH (2002), Kunsthalle Zürich, CH (1997), Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, CH (1994).
His work is in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (US), Banque Nationale Suisse, Basel (CH), Kunsthaus Zurich (CH),MAC’s, Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand-Hornu, Hornu (BE), Kunstmuseum Bern (CH), Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft, Bundesamt für Kultur, Bern (CH), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (DE).
