New Zero
Piero Manzoni / John Nixon
Henk Peeters
Jef Verheyen
Jean Tinguely
Jesus Rafael Soto
Martial Rayisse
Exhibition View
NEW ZERO - the title also indicates that contemporary artists relate to the Zero avant-garde in a number of ways, that they find prior formulations here of material definitions, views of works and an undogmatic, non-hierarchical view by art of itself that still offers material for debate and ideas for positioning today.
By choosing Sylvie Fleury, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Simone Westerwinter and Heimo Zobernig we have concentrated on artists from the generation around 1960, who argue mainly in the context of pictures in our selection. An important feature of all of them is that they do not actually relate to individual works by their predecessors, but to the way in which they were received in terms of art history, to the breath of the 'auratic' and the 'revolutionary' that is often invoked in contemporary manifestos and in essays about these artists.
Reformulations, from Fleury to Zobernig, aim to reject any claim to being absolute (by works/artists), in order to use this as a way of finding a measure that we can use to address the artistic propositions of the historical avant-garde today.