Exhibition

Any Place is a Work Place

WorkPlace is an Antwerp artist collective that was, until recently, also an artist-led exhibition space. Antwerp WorkPlace was founded by five artists, Agnes Nagygyörgy, Freija Van Esbroeck, Philippe Robeyns, Bert Timmermans and Filip Van Kerckhoven.

Until June 2015, WorkPlace organised exhibitions in a large three story building in a busy shopping street in the center of Antwerp. Alternately the members of the collective curated thematic group shows. WorkPlace aims at collaboration with a mix of artists that are established and emerging artists. WorkPlace facilitates and offers artists the opportunity to develop projects in dialogue with other professionals from all disciplines in the arts. Since the property is sold now is WorkPlace is without a “home base”. The collective continues to collaborate and possibly the exhibition project will be continued in the future. WorkPlace facilitates and offers artists the opportunity to develop projects in dialogue with other professionals from all disciplines in the arts. Since the property is sold now is WorkPlace is without a “home base”. The collective continues to collaborate and possibly the exhibition project will be continued in the future.

Artist collective Workplace

Agnes Nagygyörgy is a sculptor, but also makes installations, drawings and performances. She works with photography, video and sound recording. In her work Agnes applies elements of nature, vegetative and animal, which she uses to study psychological human processes. In doing so she elaborates and reflects on the connected processes between man and nature. In other works, her source is urban architecture, which she – in an intuitive way – dismantles, deconstructs, and re-orders again showing new growth appearing from the chaos of urban ‘wasteland’.

Bert Timmermans is fascinated by the effect of time leaving traces and gaps in the (collective) memory that form and transforms reality. Works are created in multiple sessions through procedures that build on the practical theory and theoretical praxis of assembling. Timmermans’s work is strongly committed to the procedures of imagination and translation that reflects the determination with “construction” of the past. The layering of reality and time is reflected in the techniques the artist uses: collage, digital image processing, but also a wide range of drawing materials, ink, acrylic and gouache. Bert Timmermans is represented by Roberto Polo Gallery in Brussels.

Philippe Robeyns is a painter. He works passionately and steadily on an oeuvre that is characterized by strong materiality and the consistent rejection of quick fixes or hollow aesthetics. The human being is his subject as most of his works feature people. He is in particular known for his portraits. His paintings are not portraits in the usual sense of the word. There is no person depicted in a “realistic” way, although often people from within the immediate vicinity of the artist his friends, family or his wife originate on the outset. Robeyns transforms by reflecting on the features of his subjects and gradually the figures in the paintings lose their resemblance of the persons depicted. Over time the work process adds on the work’s peculiarity. Improbabilities like the style of the clothes that cannot be identified recalls associations with military costumes, aeronaut uniforms, or carnival attire. A dark undertone, a virtuoso game with layering paints and matter as a counterweight, subtly induces as well as denies the image.

Filip Van Kerckhoven is also a painter. His work is concerned with physical mechanisms at all levels of reality. Energy, biological, geological and botanical processes are related to human identity and the human body, as well as to the organizational system in society and in technology. He is fascinated by the constant attempt of man to want to understand reality, purely by rational reasoning. In essence all classification systems pathetically fail when they attempt to grasp nature, life and existence.

Freija Van Esbroeck is not included in the exhibition Any Place is a Work Place but she is part of the collective. Freija is a sculptor she also makes installations and uses imagery and video sequences, stop-motion animation, and performance. She is active as a scenographer in cooperation with, Music Transparent, WIThWIT amongst others.