Marthe Wéry, Tour & Taxis: 7 April – 26 May 2018
Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Tour & Taxis with works from the estate of Belgian artist Marthe Wéry (1930-2005). It will open Saturday April 7 and will run until May 26. Wéry had an exhibition at Slewe Gallery fifteen years ago in the winter of 2003-2004, a year before she passed away. In this exhibition she will be commemorated with an installation of her famous floor works, she created for Tour et Taxis, an industrial restored building in Brussels in 2001.
Marthe Wéry is one of the most famous Belgian women artists of her generation. She got known with her poetic installations of monochrome coloured panels. When installed in a space, these paintings form together a new composition and get into a dialogue with the surrounding architecture. Though she is often categorized as an analytical painter, typical for her generation, it appears in her writing she felt more related to the spirituality of the Polish Constructivist Strzeminski or Barnett Newman.
Wéry lived and worked her whole life in Brussels. She studied at the Grande Chaumière in Paris. Her artistic career started when she took part in the famous Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975, exhibited at dokumenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 and represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1982. In 1982 she had a solo exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague. In 2011 the Gemeentemuseum organized an exhibition with an overview of her work, entitled The Power of Simplicity and recently, the museum exhibited an overview of her works on paper. In 2001 she had a solo exhibition at Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and in 2004 she installed an impressive solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts of Tournai (BE), including a catalogue Les couleurs du monochrome. Last year a retrospective of her work had been on view at BPS22 in Charleroi (BE). Her work has been collected internationally by several private and public institutions, such as the Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Gemeentemuseum The Hague and Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Michael Jacklin, Marthe Wéry: 23 February – 30 March 2013
Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition with new sculptures by the Dutch artist Michael Jacklin and paintings by Belgium artist Marthe Wéry, who died in 2005. The exhibition will open Saturday February 23 and will last until March 30.
Michael Jacklin (*1956) known for his man-sized grid sculptures, made of iron, will exhibit a new series of open iron constructions, entitled Le mètre. It is based on an one meter high pedestal, on which transparent boxes of thin staff iron are hanging in or stacked on each other. They follow his previous series wall sculptures Stack and Hang, in which the sculptural principles of stacking and hanging were the subject. Also in the new series a subtle play of lines and intervals occurs when you move around them.
Jacklin is one of the rare fundamental working sculptors of his generation. He focuses on the specific qualities of the material as well as on the sculptural principles such as mass, rhythm and gravity. Since 1984 he works exclusively with iron. His preference for this material derives from his fascination for iron constructions in architecture. Jacklin exhibits at Slewe Gallery on a regular base since 1995. In 2010 the gallery published a catalog with an overview of his work and a text by Maarten Bertheux. In 2002 he had an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and in 2000 he had a show at the Kunstvereniging Diepenheim. His works have been collected by several public and private collections. He has also done several public commissions in Rotterdam and Amstelveen. Jacklin lives and works in Amsterdam.
From Marthe Wéry (1930-2005), who had an exhibition at Slewe Gallery in 2003, there will be shown about five paintings dating from the last fiften years of her life. Wéry was one of the leading Belgian painters of her generation. She got known for her poetic installations of monochrome colored panels. Installed in a space the seperate paintings form together a new composition and get into a dialogue with the surrounding architecture. Though she is often categorized as an analytical painter, typical for her generation, it appears in her writing she felt more related to the spirituality of the Russian Constructivists or Barnett Newman and art which is going ‘beyond’.
Wéry studied at the Grande Chaumière in Paris. She lived and worked in Brussels for all her life. She took part in the famous Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1975), exhibited at Dokumenta in Kassel (1977) and represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale (1982). In 1987 she had a solo exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and in 2001 at Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. In 2004 she installed an impressive solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts of Tournai (BE), on which occasion the catalog Les couleurs du monochrome was published. Recently in 2011 the Gemeentemuseum The Hague organized a retrospective exhibition Marthe Wéry, the power of simplicity. Her work has been collected internationally by several private and public institutions, such as the Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.
