Artists: Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys
Exhibition title: MICRO
Venue: KIN, Brussels, Belgium
Date: April 19 – May 28, 2023
Photography: ©Fabrice Schneider, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and KIN, Brussels
Note: Exhibition’s floor plan is available here
KIN opens its inaugural show on April 19th 2023 with Harald Thys & Jos de Gruyter
KIN is a new contemporary art gallery in Brussels with a focus on artistic positions that defy easy categorisation. The name stands for kinship. The gallery is based on a network of artists that KIN’s founder, Nicolaus Schafhausen1, has been working with for numerous years. It is a commercial enterprise and a platform for artistic exchange founded on an evolving, artist-led and collaborative approach. The gallery will present exhibitions, develop projects, and program events. Designed by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, the space rethinks what a contemporary gallery can be today and creates a site that allows for multifaceted presentations of KIN’s contemporary roster.
KIN will open its doors on the 19th of April 2023 at 6pm with a simultaneous exhibition with Gladstone Gallery. The opening show will present new works by Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter and will carry the joint title: Micro Macro. The evocative title finds its source from the 1970’s Belgian television show of the same name. KIN will present MICRO, Gladstone will present MACRO. It also serves as an additional and spirited point of reference to both locations and to the scale of the artists’ mutated and scrutinizing creatures, held captive for now.
At the end of the 1970s, we watched Micro Macro on Belgian television every day. In this game show, a number of candidates were shown an extreme close-up of an object. While the image zoomed out very slowly, they had to guess which item it was. Whoever recognized it first won the corresponding object. Usually, it was a trivial thing like an ashtray, a padlock, a bucket or a mixer.
The program was mostly watched in black and white because color televisions were few and far between. This made the close-ups even more abstract and mysterious. The prolonged viewing of an object by the candidates and the TV viewers, with the tension increased by the excruciatingly slow zooming out of the image, made the game very popular, but at the same time gave it an enormous sadness. Winning a worthless bucket, lighter or candlestick gave a feeling of joy and euphoria for a very short moment. This was soon followed by an indefinable feeling of sadness and depression because the prize had no value whatsoever. However, its presence on prime-time television gave the won object a soul. It became an animistic fetish and took on a life of its own.
This “animating” of dead matter is a recurring theme in the works of Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys. Photographing an endless series of useless objects (Objects as Friends, in 2011), a video in which immobile puppets act out a tragic story (Das Loch, 2010) or a collection of mechan-ical figures of dubious character (Mondo Cane, 2019), are always attempts to give inanimate matter a soul and to bring it to life.
For their simultaneous exhibition at KIN & Gladstone, the artists create both a Microworld that refers to a kind of earthly garden of Eden and a Macroworld that refers to a kind of purgatory or hell on Earth.
In the Microworld, the viewer is invited to closely observe haunting creatures imprisoned in a terrarium. Self-contained ecosystems inhabited by altered beings. Mutated snakes and rats with human heads live in enclosed spaces reminiscent of an illegal laboratory experimenting with new life forms. New life forms that have the potential to replace humanity.
In the Macroworld, it is the viewer who is observed by the sculptures.
We are beings populating a weary society, in which people attempt, with the courage of desperation, to create a cozy contentment from a, maybe, failed existence. But, once they escape from their biosphere, we cannot withstand the emergence of the new organisms from the Microworld.
