After settling down as a family in a new country, a new city, neighborhood, what is a better kick-off for diving into the local art scene than the Brussels Gallery Weekend which each year starts the season after a long summer. The Gallery Weekend in September and the Art Brussels in April are kind of the focus points in the yearly calendar of visual art here. Not only the big commercial galleries and big museums are orienting their exhibitions towards those events but also the off-scene is more than active in showing what´s going on in their spaces, with their residents, what projects are going on etc.
For me personally it was a great pleasure to visit CLEARING Gallery Brussels for the first time as I know CLEARING from New York where the run an quite exciting space in Brooklyn - same as in N.Y.C. CLEARING Gallery is near my neighborhood here in Brussels. The space is huge with an impressive architecture, perfect to display the works by Jean-Marie Appriou. By the way, the also represent Bruno Gironcoli - would be amazing to see his works there.
Well, highlight of the opening evening of course was the opening of René Daniëls exhibition Fragments from an Unfinished Novel at the fantastic WIELS. I was quite honoured to get to know the artist, whose works I´ve also seen in New York, personally - his œvre is impressive and touching.
Then there was Vanderborght Building that weekend. Three floors present exhibition like Generation Brussels which to me unfortunately was not appealing. And, there was A performance Affair — a kind of performance festival within the Gallery Weekend. Informally opened by a performance of Joris Van de Moortel and his team. I´ve to confess that the sound of that happing at 11 am in the morning, in this architectural environment took over everything and didn´t really make it possible for all the other scheduled artist to start their performances.
For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.