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Michael Van den Abeele at Gaudel de Stampa

May 13, 2022

Artist: Michael Van den Abeele

Exhibition title: What’s for Dinner

Venue: Gaudel de Stampa, Paris, France

Date: March 23 – May 14, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gaudel de Stampa, Paris

«What’s for Dinner» presents a new sequence of small scaled beds, which continues the series the artist started in 2017.

The beds have an outer frame, often but not always combined with various types of spring & support-structures: a frame and a grid, a waking vacancy. The absence of a mattress, as well as the fact that most of the beds are hanging vertically on the wall, confirm that the idea of comfort is suspended. The beds’ scale of approximately 50%- is chosen because it relates to nothing: it does not fit an adult human body, nor a child or even a puppet. Therefore it remains the idea or the fantasy of a bed. They are empty containers, and in combination with their singular designs of their frames they can be perceived as dramatic personae or a characters.

These works continue the artist’s concern with the shapes and the organisations of desire, our singularity and our sequence. Family, gangs, lovers, solitude and societies or domestic animals to name a few. In the creation of these institutions, forms have to be found and reflected upon: single, double, doubting. The bed is first a structural negotiation, between a body and the un-even earth. This is the syntax of the bed. After that semantics can take care of itself and most interpretations will not be wrong.

Michael Van den Abeele lives in Brussels and works with diverse media and recurring narratives. Past presentations and exhibitions took place at la Maison de rendez-vous – Brussels; MuHKA – Antwerp; La Salle de Bains – Lyon; Gaudel de Stampa – Paris; Marquise – Lisbon; CAC – Vilnius; Museum Leuven and WIELS Brussels. Since 2003 he is associated with the Brussels-based exhibition space Etablissement d’en face. The book Forked Apologies, published in 2017 (Forrest & Motto distribution), gathers a selection of applied writing in art.