Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK

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    Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) is an artist of singular complexity. Born in 1951 in Antwerp, where she still lives and works, she has been active since the 1970s as a visual artist, graphic designer and performer. She has always been a pioneer. She should, first and foremost, be considered an artist for the future. AMVK’s practice is truly interdisciplinary.

    M HKA wants to introduce Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven to a wider audience as an innovator of forms and interpreter of moods - as oxygen of the whole society.

    On Mars the Rising Sun is Blue

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    (c)image: AMVK
    23 October - 28 November 2009
    Zeno X Gallery, Borgerhout, Antwerpen

    ANTWERP – Zeno X Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition ‘On Mars the Rising Sun is Blue’, a solo show with new works by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven. Eight large works will be on show at the Gallery, while a selection of recent works on paper, a light box and a film will be presented at Zeno X Storage.

    On view at Zeno X Gallery are eight large Plexiglass plates, forming a complex universe in which AMVK used texts and pin-ups from a magazine to create multilayered images. Each work is made of a doubled computerprint that was printed on both sides of the Plexi plate. Additional layers were formed by painting the backsides of the plates with gesso and by placing mirrors behind all works. While looking at AMVK’s work, the viewer finds his image reflected in the unprinted- or painted surfaces. Main source for this new series was “JEM” – The Magazine for Masterful Man!”, a magazine founded in 1958 in New York which had an explicit sexist editorial policy seen on the magazine's covers and inside pictorials showing sexy but servile housewife’s. AMVK scanned 8 double pages of the magazine and transformed them into compositions populated by fragmentized female bodies, text excerpts, heavy colors and abstract forms.

    By thoroughly distorting the female body, the doubling of the prints and the reflection of our own image through the work, AMVK – as a contemporary mystica – transforms this persistently JEM imagery in an intuitive way, giving it a second life.

    On view at Zeno X Storage are the film ‘Backwards’ (2000), ‘Zerzan’ a lightbox from the ‘Philosophical Rooms’ serie (2005), and 32 new works on paper. Diary-like drawings in a wide range of colors and materials, in which carefully constructed spaces are filled with fascinating forms, texts and gentle spheres. Just as the title of the exhibition ‘On Mars the Rising Sun is Blue’, the presence of these spheres alludes to the relativity of each point of view, and the opening to positive energy and creativity that can arise from this thought.

    Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (°1951, lives and works in Antwerp) had a.o. the important solo exhibition ‘EZFK’ at Kunsthalle Bern (CH) and ‘Nursing care - in Melancholy Stupor’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (BE). A major retrospective entitled ‘Nothing More Natural’ focusing on her drawings started at Kunstmuseum Luzern (CH) in 2008, and traveled to Wiels, Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (BE), Kunsthalle Nürnberg (DE) concluding with a last venue this winter at Frac Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (FR) from November 6 till January 3, 2010. In 2008 AMVK was included in Manifesta 7 in Italy. From 2007 onwards, she is involved as the central artist in ‘Parallellepipeda’ a cross disciplinary research project bringing together scientists of the University of Leuven and visual artists. The result of their cooperation will be presented in an exhibition at M Museum in Leuven (BE), January 2010. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of Kunsthalle Bern (CH), SMAK, Ghent (BE), Muhka, Antwerp (BE), Frac Pas de Loire, Carquefou (FR) and many private collections.

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