Artists: Elissa Lacoste, Natacha Mankowski, Steven the Carpenter, Thom Trojanowski
Exhibition title: Nude
Curated by: Boris Devis
Venue: Everyday Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: September 4 – October 5, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Everyday Gallery, Antwerp
Antwerp, August 30 – A second group show Nude will open its doors on Wednesday the 4th of September at Everyday Gallery with Elissa Lacoste, Natasha Mankowski, Thom Trojanovski and Steven the Carpenter, curated by Boris Devis.
‘Nude in the soil, the appearance of the stone, the digital texture. Nude in a society organized around image and social consensus. Nude, referring to our History, through painting, materials, through the absolute necessity to be true, natural and pure.’
Nude comes to arise in September at the beginning of a new season, as a feeling of purity rids of the dictates of the contemporary world in which we evolve, blissful beast of bondage for far too long.
The spectator will be invited here to contemplate, to feel the limits of the compositions. Letting go in powerful digital visions of allegorical work which will take them to the other side, towards a parallel world where it will be possible to observe our world through a study of these limits, of these territories, in order to understand its essence.
Nude intelligently mixes different entities that all interrelate in order to create this visual and narrative substance, around the earth, the touch, the senses.
Boris Devis, managing director of Everyday Gallery, continues his research as an innovative and radical curator by inviting four contemporary artists, all speaking across different media, but sharing the same need to create their own language to express themselves. For Nude, he brings together Natacha Mankowski, Thom Trojanovski, Steven The Carpenter and Elissa Lacoste in an exhibition that creates an unexpected and complex dialogue between their respective works and practices.
In this exhibition, we are invited to reflect on the notion of territory, our state of matter, the one which constitutes the object, the point of departure or application of thought. Through the textures, the layers, the mass, there is a slow fading into pale, natural tones, sometimes evoking the contact of a hand palm, the crack of a lip or the rift of a plaster wall. Thus we untie ourselves from our digital or moral adornments, we approach the substance that constitutes the sensible world, the bodies, to melt with, we enter a new quest for ourselves.
About Natacha Mankowski
The works marked “human landscape” by the painter and architect Natacha Mankowski, combining nature and man, will lead you to examine the relationship between the genesis and decline of these spaces. Exploring quarries, mines, shipyards, the artist establishes cycles and recycles the elements found on these rugged terrain. Sand, clay, marble powders, she assembles them to create her own material, developing a primitive composition mixing ancestrality and contemporary practice. Between modeling and space, the results from these superpositions of layers, masses, lines, and graffiti, evoking the inscriptions left in the streets or on the marble blocks of the quarries, are a reflection on a cultural cycle and on the history of our civilizations.
About Thom Trojanovski
Thom Trojanovski will present for NUDE paintings that transcend the surface in two dimensions to become sculptural pieces imbued with autobiographical elements. Plaster on canvas, bleach on cotton, tone of flesh and kisses, from Thom’s pieces results a delicate attention between memories and sculpture. In these singular and mysterious installations, the artist invites us to take time to appreciate a part of himself, which will undoubtedly echo your own sensitivity.
About Steven The Carpenter
At the same time, it is certain that Steven The Carpenter’s intuitive works, between 3D and oil painting, will surely leave the wandering viewer in a metaphorical world. Somewhere between social networks and propaganda, a dream emerges, absurd and surreal. The artist enjoys contemplating the remains of dreams, assembling intuitively these, putting aside his analytical mind, the one we are forced to follow growing up. He thus returns to the game, mixing ambiguous elements, in order to offer viewers a mirror of their own subjectivity, like a work that reflects an objective truth outside their experience.
About Elissa Lacoste
Elissa Lacoste’s feelings will be brought to bare by her instinctive works. Elissa is a former resident of alfa.brussels (a studio residence also initiated by Boris, to encourage the practice of a functional art). Here, the unconventional and vibrant texture of her sculptural works lies between the real and the surreal while retaining a hint of functionality. Silicone and polystyrene embrace and become inexplicable forms and sensory support, questioning our relationship to our physical environment and the limits of the contemporary world.
About Boris Devis
Boris Devis (38) grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and design enthusiasts. He studied economics and psychology at the universities of Antwerp and Leuven. He founded Goldwood ten years ago. In that context he specialized in the international sale & advice on collectable vintage design. A few months ago he launched alfa.brussels. With a passion for “functional art”, he invites creative people to create new work in an artist’s residence, which is housed at Zaventem Ateliers. The fact that they will now have the possibility to show the work done at Everyday Gallery (YYY) closes the loop. Although the three entities initially function independently of each other, interactions may arise in the future.
About Everyday Gallery
Everyday Gallery (YYY), a newcomer in the southern district of Antwerp, aims to offer a space of radical freedom of thought and action that is not limited to the established values of the world of design and art. A space of contemporary art that transcends and questions its market and our vision of the every day life.
