Liliane Vertessen at Tick Tack

Artist: Liliane Vertessen

Exhibition title: Art is Burning

Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: May 27 – July 9, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tick Tack, Antwerp

TICK TACK is pleased to announce ART IS BURNING, a solo exhibition by Belgian visionary artist Liliane Vertessen (1952).

Liliane Vertessen’s career took off in the mid 70’s when she, as one of the first Belgian artists, started using her own body as an artistic medium. Vertessen pictures herself in decor-like private happenings while playing with a range of female stereotypical roles: temptress, femme fatale, whore, innocent girl, queen, mademoiselle. These images balance exhibitionism and kitsch-like make-belief, both celebrating and criticizing its subject matter. The analogue photographs are then reworked with colors and various objects (stickers, textile, eccentric frames, neon lights,…) into assemblages with a nod to pin-up imagery.

Later in her career, Vertessen created large-scale sculptures, blow-ups of kitsch objects and figures that often appear in her photographs. With these multiple tracks of artistic creation around the cliché ‘Woman’ figure, Vertessen shields her own identity from the outside world.

Vertessen’s works often caused commotion. In 1981, one of her exhibitions was labeled as ‘unfit’ by the then mayor of Turnhout (BE). In the same decade, she opened a duo-exhibition at PCBK Hasselt (BE) together with Cindy Sherman, the American superstar photographer.

Ten years after her last institutional soloshow (CC Hasselt), TICK TACK opens up its three-floor exhibition space (a design from 1955 by Léon Stynen) and gives Vertessen a production budget, bringing together older unseen key works (since 1974) and new recent works. For this special occasion, Vertessen will present her first video piece on CINEMA TICK TACK, a retrospective work with a selection of images and music from Vertessen’s personal archive spanning more than five decades.

Liliane Vertessen (1952, Leopoldsburg) lives and works in Heusden Zolder. Past exhibitions include Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (1983); PCBK, Hasselt (duo show with Cindy Sherman, 1987); S.M.A.K., Ghent (1989); Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1989); M HKA, Antwerp (1992) and Mu.ZEE, Ostend (1996), Musée de la Fotographie, Charleroi (2018).