Guillaume Bijl: Multiples & Editions

by Johan Pas, David Vermeiren

Overview

• Banal and kitschy objects installed in ironic and juxtaposed installations by the famous Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl

• A wonderful display of multiples and editions as an art form

Guillaume Bijl: Multiples & Editions, co-published with Walther Koening, shows the obscure yet fundamentally intriguing transformative installations by the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl (°1946), who surprised the international art world of the early 1980s. Galleries, art spaces and museum were radically transformed into ordinary looking commercial or entertainment venues like carpet stores, supermarkets or TV-Quiz decors. Apart from these, Bijl presents slices of dead pan reality as ‘situation-installations’ and ‘compositions trouvées’. Lesser known, but widely distributed are the multiples Bijl created in the context of an installation or an exhibition. These objects seem extremely banal or kitschy but acquire a different meaning when seen as part of Bijl’s artistic strategy of staging and appropriation. Together with the posters and books Bijl designed, all of Bijl’s multiples are collected for the first time in this catalogue raisonné. In English and Dutch.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783960989622
Publisher:	Stockmans Art Books
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	8.66(w) x 11.69(h) x 0.90(d)
Language:	Dutch

About the Author

More important to Guillaume Bijl (°1946) than the art courses he started in the 1960s and which he never completed were the administrative professions he pursued in the 1970s to earn a living. This 'university of life' in the lower middle class circuit made Bijl realize that art – even if it is conceptual – must represent a reality supported by the widest possible audience. In the meantime, Bijl has been building a consistent oeuvre for more than thirty years that he considers “realistic testimonies to visually deal with my time”. As a kind of European adept of appropriation art, an American art movement that emerged in the early 1980s with artists such as Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, Bijl reproduces existing images from everyday life almost literally with the aim of “the codes of our consumer society as image clichés of to expose themselves.”. Guillaume Bijl plays a delicate game with reality. In his installations and compositions he creates an everyday situation that seems familiar and completely familiar to us. He has copied a travel agency or a dog grooming salon so perfectly that fiction and reality have become inseparable. Guillaume Bijl thus holds up a mirror to us like a contemporary jester: as long as things appear to be what we think, then we will settle for them. We want to believe what we see.