A Perfect Shop-Front: young Belgian Kasper Bosmans on display at the Fondazione Pomodoro

From February 17 to May 14, 2021, the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan presents the first appointment of the new Project Rooms exhibition cycle , an “observatory” project dedicated to the most recent developments in the international art scene, entrusted for 2021 to guest curator Eva Fabbris. The first exhibition is A Perfect Shop-Front by the young Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans (Lommel, 1990), who associates different socio-political themes and historical-cultural contexts in forms that draw on heraldic repertoires, folklore symbolism, the ready-made tradition and the history of decoration. Combined according to a wholly subjective attitude, these elements come together in works that tell and theorize about unusual mythologies in an attempt to find new ways of telling knowledge. Anecdotes from different times and places are translated into elegant, witty and ironic paintings, installations and objects.

For Project Room #13, the artist has designed a complex intervention in which elements of his practice are linked to some strictly contemporary instances, such as environmental disasters and physical limitations brought about by the pandemic. The ensemble of works triggers a dimension of flânerie that is anything but disengaged, in which the viewer encounters reminders of political consciousness in forms that take their cues from a radical approach to folk art, between concept and material history.

Bosmans devised a painted frieze on the floor runs through the Foundation space: it is a decorative and symbolic element that enigmatically transforms the environment. Entitled Wolf Corridors & Stamp Forest (2020), the frieze evokes the relationship between Europe’s highway traffic network and the portions of nature that remain trapped by high-speed arteries, interfering with the migratory habits of wild animals such as wolves, for which portions of forests are artificially safeguarded to continue to allow their movements. Although two-dimensional, this frieze influences the trajectories of visitors passing through the exhibition space. Again, the installation A Perfect Shop-Front (2021), conceived for this exhibition (to which it gives its title) consists of a window/window, reminiscent of those in typical Dutch houses, where objects related to the political and cultural history of the United States collected by the artist are displayed: together with their display device, these objects (books, posters, photographs... ) create a short-circuit between public and private dimensions, between politics and the micro-history told by the individual object.

A similar ambiguity is represented by Vermiculated Rust ication (2016), a wall-drawing depicting a faux stone wall embellished with Renaissance ashlar (a motif also taken up by Milanese design in the 1980s), which visually evokes the small tunnels dug by worms in the soil: a pattern that, alluding to an organic dynamic of decay, seems to contradict the hardness of the stone.

Project Room #13 confirms Bosmans’ predilection for an installation-based declination of sculpture to which the artist associates in all his exhibitions with small paintings entitled Legend (2020): allusive compositions of symbols, heraldic motifs, signs and codes that serve as a narrative trace in relation to the three-dimensional works. The exhibition itinerary is completed by the instruction piece Lazy Susan (2020).

Kasper Bosmans lives and works between Brussels and Amsterdam. A graduate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, Kasper Bosmans is internationally known as one of the most promising artists of his generation. His practice, capable of embracing universal themes that elude the categories of time and space, makes use of a symbolic language, made up of signs and gestures that refer to a historical past and present, and serve as tools for decoding reality. His work has been exhibited in Europe and abroad, in galleries and institutions. Solo exhibitions include Kasper Bosmans - Project Room #13 (Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan 2020), Kasper Bosmans: Four (Gladstone 64, New York 2020), Kunstintegratie Kasper Bosmans (In Frascati) (Papegaaistraat, Belgium 2018), De Veemarkt (Stad Lommel, Belgium 2018), Das Verflixte 7. Jahr (Fuerstenberg Zeitgenossich, Germany 2018), Chip Log (Gladstone Gallery, New York 2018), The Worlds and Days (De Hallen, Netherlands 2017), Model Garden (Gladstone Gallery, Brussels 2016), Decorations (Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam 2016). Group exhibitions include The Penumbral Age: Art in the Time of Planetary Change (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 2020), In the Presence of Absence: Proposals for the Museum Collection (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2020), Together (M HKA, Antwerp 2020), Four Flags (Amsterdam 2020), Was Machen Sie um zwei? Ich schlafe (GAK, Bremen 2020), Blood and Soil: Dark Arts for Dark Times (Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius 2019), Young Artists in Europe: Metamorphosis (Fondation Cartier, Paris 2019), Stories of Almost Everyone (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2018). In 2020 the Walther König publishing house will publish Dovetail, the first monograph devoted to the artist. In 2021 Kasper Bosmans will be featured in a solo exhibition at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels.

The exhibition, designed for the Foundation, was conceived entirely from a distance. By delegating the making of the work and its installation to others, the artist has applied a method of operation that historically harks back to the fringe of conceptual art closest to Dada, open to questioning authorship to the point of being able to embrace the intervention of chance. This choice is also charged with an additional meaning related to today’s contingency that makes physical movement and travel difficult. For Bosmans, who is close to this tradition, the idea of operating at a distance by sharing instructions also means placing emphasis on the dynamics of work, the division of roles and the chain of subjectivities that contribute to “creation.”

The exhibition opens from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 7 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. Free admission, access allowed to a maximum of five people at a time. Reservations recommended at this link. For info: info@fondazionearnaldopomodoro.it, +39 02 890 753 94, www.fondazionearnaldopomodoro.it. On the occasion of the Project Room, the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation is dedicating a publication to A Perfect Shop-Front, containing a conversation between Kasper Bosmans and Roger Hiorns on the themes of the exhibition.

A Perfect Shop-Front: young Belgian Kasper Bosmans on display at the Fondazione Pomodoro

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