M HKA Ensembles

Other, 112 x 160 x 25 cm.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist.

°1959, works and lives in Antwerp (BE).

Philip Huyghe’s oeuvre balances between comedy and cult, between reality and surrealism. Huyghe creates installations, photographs, videos, light boxes, drawings, objects and sculptures in which he often refers to a bourgeois environment. His work is critically intense and entertains us with an illusion - a rare combination in a work of art. Huyghe’s work appeals to us directly, because of its recognisability and often funny undertone, which prompt us to disentangle its secrets.

He studied at KASK Gent (BE), the Staedelschule Frankfurt A/M (D) and the Jan Van Eyck Academie of Maastricht (NL). He has shown his work both in Europe and in the States. He had solo shows in MUHKA Antwerpen (BE), Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin (D) and on Arco Madrid and showed his work in the Corcoran Gallery Washington DC.  From 2009 till 2015 he was a researcher at the UGent / HoGent and recently achieved a PhD in Fine Arts. Philip Huyghe is the founder of AAIR, an international artist in residence and research program.

Early on in his career Philip Huyghe realised collages with transparent material (colour copy on acetate). Artists using collage techniques are assemblers of quotations, or as Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it in Wild Thought: 'bricoleurs'. For Lévi-Strauss, bricolage is primitive myth-making: what is dominated by bricolage is a parallel order of thought. Artists are at the same time bricoleurs and engineers. The concept 'new primitive' represents a marriage between images of reason and ritual, civilised and primitive, concept and intuition. These contrasts are still visible in the collage technique.

Recently, after several wanderings in other media, Philip Huyghe has developed a renewed interest in this collage technique. For the first time, the transparencies are now also presented on light boxes, which through their use also acquire a proper function in the work, e.g. the flies in the work Selfportrait as a Corpse are also present on the plexiglass cover of the work, so that they act as an extra layer and the hood doesn't merely have a protective function. In the new works, Philip Huyghe brings together found images, (his own) archive and fabricated elements in a space defined by grid structures. He incorporates these in collages, creating open stories that refer to personal reflections and universal considerations that are literally brought together in transparent, interacting layers.

The Mystic Marriage and Selfportrait as a Corpse are structures built within different zones. Both refer to a space created by imitating a ritual or a condition. On the one hand, Selfportrait as a Corpse is an investigation of the (in-between) space that arises when someone pretends to be dead or is in suspended animation. Hippolyte Bayard's 1840 photograph Autoportrait d’un noyé (Self-portrait of a drowned man) is also the first staged photograph in history in which an artist plays his own death. A corpse that may or may not be there. In The Mystic Marriage, the marriage is not consummated and the union remains mystical, it only takes place in the mind of the viewer – who tries to connect the different parts of the collage and through whom the (mystical) marriage takes place.