Kasper Bosmans at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present the New York debut of Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans. Rooted in historical research, Bosmans disentangles the intersection of signs that create cultural meaning in both micro and macro registers. His interdisciplinary works include institutional intervention, installation, sculpture, and painting that parse and restructure the objects and symbols from varied political, artistic, and social orders. For this exhibition, entitled Chip Log, Bosmans investigates diverse cultural relics—taken from the realms of government, folk art, and technology—in order to establish new modes of reading the history of power and knowledge that linger in spaces between concept and material.

Bosmans constructs his installation in rebus-like chapters evoking political artifacts and labor practices reified into material gestures: the famed Amber Room of Friedrich I and Star Chamber of Henry VIII, sites associated with monarchical overreach; the Ebstorf Mappa Mundi, a 13th century map of the known world from the European perspective; nautical hand logs, instruments used to measure the speed of a ship; and signature quilts, a folk practice of fundraising to honor veterans. Presented as an ensemble of painting, sculpture, textile, and wallpaper, he critiques the traditions and inventions of European institutions of power through rendering them as inert aestheticobjects. Deconstructing and rearranging recognizable historical narratives throughout this installation, Bosmans takes a critical survey of larger holistic patterns and idiosyncratic cultural connections that reinforce power, production, and knowledge. As in his Legends paintings, small-scale works that employ legible symbols and graphic relationships as linguistic antecedent, Bosmans translates the mythic signification of these cultural relics into plastic materiality through facsimile and abstraction. In this way, his installation directs the viewer to decipher paths connecting design and politics as it threads through the varied chapters of politics, technology, and folk culture.

Kasper Bosmans was born in 1990 and lives and works in Brussels and Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: A Temporary Futures Institute at M HKA, Antwerp (2017); The Words and Days (mud gezaaid, free range), De Hallen, Haarlem (2017); Kathmandu Triennale, Nepal (2017); Poetica_Politica, Foundation de 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg (2016); Decorations, Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2016); Specimen Days, S.M.A.K., Ghent (2016); Loot, Soil, and Cleanliness, CIAP, Hasselt (2016); Motif (Oil and Silver), Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); Yesterday was different with Marthe Ramm Fortun, KOMPLOT, Brussels (2015); Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong (2015); Little Cherry Virus, P/////akt, Amsterdam (2015); Un-Scene III, Wiels, Brussels (2015). Bosmans’ work will be on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from January 28 – May 6, 2018 as a part of the group exhibition, Stories of Almost Everyone.