Artist: Jakup Auce
Exhibition title: DE ELLENDE VAN JOB
Venue: trampoline, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: September 1– October 1, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and trampoline
“For his second solo exhibition at trampoline, Antwerp, Brooklyn-born visual artist Jakup Auce created a group of four sculptures. Together they reflect the frustrations and problems that he experienced as a young artist. The inspiration for this work came from the Book of Job in the Old Testament, more specifically the passage where Job’s friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar support him in the trials he is subjected to.
The work has a strikingly sensitive quality, which is enhanced by the various materials and the dark colors. The sculptures also exude a sense of monumentality and strength. Auce reduces the figures to their most concise and telling form. The blocks of concrete on the floor determine their postures and gestures. The group of sculptures is executed in an unconventional way. Auce treats them not as an ensemble, but as separate figures. They are introverted characters, isolated by their doubts and lack of understanding”.
This exhibition text is an adapted version of the description of Ossip Zadkine’s masterpiece The Misery of Job on the website of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Jakup Auce’s new works are based on Zadkine’s group of four sculptures created in 1914. DE ELLENDE VAN JOB can be seen as a sincere tribute to an artist who, like him, emigrated and developed his artistic activity outside of his native country.
As an answer to the monumental sculptures in the main exhibition space, Jakup Auce also presents an edition as homage to the British artist, make-up artist and underground fashion icon Gary Barnes, aka Trojan, in the office of the gallery. Contrary to Ossip Zadkine, Barnes experienced fame during his youth but unfortunately died of a drug overdose in 1986 at the age of 22.
