When the Water Clouded Over is a renowned photography project and photo book by Belgian conceptual artist Michaël Dans. Over two years, he meticulously created and photographed floral still-life installations, ultimately using a darkroom process to let the decaying flowers fade and "come back to life" in striking new forms.
It all began with the photograph of a still life at his grandmother’s home ...
For more than two years, Michaël Dans created and also photographed floral installations from vases, fabrics or wallpapers rummaged or borrowed here and there with a methodology and a concern for detail and staging identical to those of a still-life painter.
And Nature regains its rights in the secrecy of his photo laboratory; with everything then coming back to life ... Flowers are sublimated, whether they are natural or not, with their buds barely open, in full bloom or wilted.
“Allegories of kitsch? Bad taste? Not so sure. Michaël Dans needed tenderness as much as acumen to accompany these old ladies to their final resting place. His sensitivity is reflected in his portrait of them, far removed from the pictures to be found in the catalogues of florists and garden centres, and he offers us armfuls of pictures like the glossy postcards people used to send in the old days, decorated with phrases in golden letters,” writes Xavier Canonne.
Some forty-five compositions will blossom on the walls of the Museum.
Michaël Dans graduated with a painting degree from the ESA Saint-Luc Art School in Liège and his work has been featured in an increasing number of solo and joint exhibitions. Just like the itinerant life he has led, living in turn in Liège, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Berlin, Antwerp ..., Michael Dans expresses himself with techniques as dif- ferent as installation, performance, sculpture, drawing or photograph. This diversity is also to be found in the subjects addressed (death, loneliness, eroticism, childhood, etc.) and the formats used: from the drawing to the giant Mikado including the throwing of seventeen precious stones in a meadow at the time of Kunst & Zwalm. From his beginnings, this eclecticism was an opportunity for him to get away from any type of categorisation and surf with ease through the codes of contemporary art. In this way, Michaël Dans always enrols his artistic proposition in a specific relationship with exhibition contexts (architectural, conceptual, etc.) so that it generates its own relevance. In a subtle and entertaining way, he takes advantage of the different work opportunities he is offered in order to build interventions in a constantly shifting perspective, distracting the onlooker with the art of diversion. On the borderline of objects and attitudes, he creates message-bearing works transmit- ted with the help of a cynical and critical humour on a background of melancholy, introspection and eroticism.
After his studies in the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Michael Dans notably exhibited at the Centre National d’Art et du Paysage de Vassivière (France), at the BPS22 in Charleroi, at L’Espace 251 Nord in Liège, at the Galerie Le Sous-sol in Paris, at the Galerie Aliceday in Brussels, at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, at the Quartier 21 in Vienna, at the Wiels in Brussels, at the Virgil de Voldère Gallery in New York, at Le Lieu unique and at the Galeries Lafayette in Nantes, at the Galerie Nadja Vilenne in Liège.
https://museephoto.be/news/55/65/Micha%C3%ABl-Dans.-When-the-water-clouded-over/d,ExpositionsTemporaires-Gabarit-Article.html
Fr/En/Nl
Textes : Jean-Michel Botquin et Douglas Park.
décembre 2018
Antwerp
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