M HKA Ensembles

Installation, 195 x 69 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK6912_M158).

The works of Goele de Bruyn, like the raincoats and the Sinterklaasraket, at first seem like an attempt to reconstruct everyday things, a reconstruction executed with the greatest of care in all manner of home-, garden and kitchen materials.  Goele de Bruyn collects all the materials she comes across, and with these materials she makes things often inspired by the world of the child.  Children’s clothes made from garbage bags or a ‘Santa-Claus’ from aluminum foil.  On first view jolly kids’ handicrafts, but at the same time also nostalgic and ironical works with a wink to the often all too serious, established world of contemporary art.

Nuancing, ambiguity and good humor come together here.  The artist herself puts it as follows: ‘I start from apparent contradictions, both as to form and content, and then try to reconcile them.  The everyday becomes strange and threatening; the threatening becomes something ‘normal’.  I begin from an aesthetic given that during the process of making acquires a certain acerbity and kitshyness, in a way shifting it out of balance, and rendering it uncertain and touching.  Or I combine the piece with an unexpected element that doesn’t really fit, and this disturbs the restfulness and the aesthetic.  Every work must propose a fresh problem, so that the method itself doesn’t gain the upper hand.’   

The raincoats that are to provide protection are made from garbage bags; the ‘Santa-Claus’ on his glass cloud is also a rocket.  A meeting of nostalgia and estrangement.  Through their simplicity these works possess a certain unpretentiousness.  At the same time, the assemblage of different materials and the play with contradictions and proportions go to evoke other possible associations and new meanings.  The works remain puzzles, ruses, a form of seduction.  In the end it comes down to the viewer seeing in these works what he or she wishes to see, ascribing to them one’s own personal significances.