A wide range of Christoph Broich's work will be presented in a huge solo project inside the exhibition < No Man's Land > at Verbeke Foundation:
the famous work "The Girl Who Sold her Soul to the Devil and Won" (inspired by Amanda Lear and lauded by The New York Times and Le Monde), other latex/fabric sculptures, photographs and textile artworks (some are shown in public for the first time), a collaboration artwork together with New York artist Jimi Dams, and a 'work in progress' made of iron tubes in collaboration with furniture manufacturer UNIC Design.
Exhibition: < NO MAN'S LAND >
featuring: Christoph Broich, Maurice Carlier, Frans Van Praet, Hans De Pelsmacker, Dries Otten, Emiel Veranneman, Hannes Van Severen, Thijs Bakker, Sarah Pillen, Dirk Van Gogh, Peter Van Riet, Arne Quinze, Xavier Lust, Jurgen Oskamp, Dirk Wynants
< WORK IN PROGRESS > Christoph Broich with UNIC Design, Louis De Cordier, Tim Volckaert, Chantal Grard, Bart De Zutter, Koen Van Mechelen, Frederik De Wilde, Geoffrey De Beer, Frank F. Castelyns, Eric Van Hove < PERMANENTIE > Joep Van Lieshout, Jan Fabre, Moritz Ebinger, Seymour Likely, Peter Buggenhout, Peter De Cupere, Martin Uit den Bogard, Ilap, Camiel Van Breendam, Rolf Schuermans, < PERMANENTIE > Collage and Assemblage exhibition from 1915 until now including Solo van Sofie Muller
Opening hours: Thu-Sat 11-6PM
The show runs from 15 December 2007 thru 4 May 2008.
(thick clothes recommended - it's a winter exhibition)
Invite attached.
For more information about the exhibition please contact Verbeke Foundation at +32-3-789 22 07 or info@verbekefoundation.com
the third Lara Casting was held last weekend in the gay commune where Christoph lived together with his boyfriend in the late eighties. (sounds like 'summer of love' but it was 20 years later)
CHRISTOPH BROICH @ UNISEX As part of envoy's ongoing extra muros projects, Christoph Broich will have his Lara Wo Bist Du? performance at Unisex @ The Delancey (168 Delancey btw Clinton and Attorney) July 5th. RSVP is required at listlistlist@gmail.com.
Lara, wo bist du? (Lara where are you?) is an ongoing project by Christoph Broich, which started in 1993 and which will end once Lara has been found. Lara was the girl in a video piece Christoph Broich created in 1993. When the artist wanted to continue the series devoted to her, he was unable to locate her, and has since been unable to find her.
Lara, wo bist du? became an obsessive series of work in search of Lara. The series consists of five separate pieces: the actual video piece, a video still light box installation, an inter-active performance documented by polaroids and two sculptures.
For the performance piece, the audience is invited to put on a red wig, a replica of Lara’s hairdo. Much as the prince in Cinderella sliding the glass slipper on a number of women’s feet, Broich continues his quest for Lara by putting a wig on innocent bystanders. As with a lot of Broich’s work, the “shell” of the work remains, in this case polaroids, referencing “wanted” posters that intriguingly document the performance.
here you can find the pictures from the Lara event in Antwerp:
Over the past two years, Christoph Broich has received international attention with sculptural installations that have come to stand for a willful sensitivity to the body and mortality. His work is a manifestation of the complex and unquiet correlation between life and work, material and concept.
In his Kopf (Head) series, the artist successfully expands his visual vocabulary by creating a cohesive environment around a single element, the head. Cut up iconic items of clothing and fabric are collaged onto busts and then painted with several coats of latex. Upon completion, as with all of Broich’s meticulously made sculptures, the bust is destroyed and the shell (skin) is all that remains. Broich’s skinned sculptures focus on deterioration and present the reversal of the natural process: skin and flesh decomposing first and the skeleton remaining. Suspended from the ceiling, the heads create an eerie field of beheaded individuals.
Inspired by Weimar bacchanalia, his most recent work, Voluptuous Panic (the title is taken from Mel Gordon's book on Weimar Berlin), invites the viewer to become part of the action. Understanding the importance of absence as well as presence in the deployment of his sculpted elements within a real space, Broich proves to be a master at orchestration and placement.
Spatially isolated through perspectival techniques, curious manipulated, cast characters populate the weirdly decadent environment. The choice of mannequins, empty, non-threatening 'everyone' figures is deliberate, its effect one of alienation.
Choreographed single and multiple groups of characters, seated or lying on the counter of a bar or nightclub, are enmeshed in an emotional confrontation with an unspecified narrative. At one end of the counter, a protagonist’s Siamese body curves back in spontaneous recoil. Each posture and gesture suggesting urgency and concern, tension and empathy. At the other end, a figure leans forward, as if wanting to move out of the drama, but its inability to move seems to frustrate the desire to act. All of the characters in Voluptuous Panic sustain a bland look. They stare into emptiness as they lean on enigmatic moments frozen in space and time, a singular, inexplicable silent moment.
Christoph Broich was bornin Stadt Blankenberg, Germany. He graduated from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium in 1994. The artist had his first exhibition at envoy with “Never Mind The Bollocks: Here’s Amanda Lear,” in April 2006. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. (text: Enoy)
Lara, wo bist du, a video and performance project that started in 1993 will be featured at Unisex Salon at the Delancey on July 5th. Check http://envoy.typepad.com/ for details.
envoy . 131 Chrystie Street . New York . NY 10002 . 212.226.4555 . www.envoygallery.com
Joyce Caris presents a very interesting work in latex in the course of the last years exhibition of the Royal Academie of Fine Arts Antwerp (Zonstraat 20-24). The installation reminds of an anatomy room in the university of medical sciences. The latex sculptures are made in moulds taken from persons and children's dolls. Single bodily parts from different people are put together in showboxes: a box for ears, a box for noses and another one for penisses...
Joyce Caris 'A Perfect Skin', 2007
In contradiction to that Christoph Broich creates sculptures. He put the latex (in combination with fabric and other materials) over the sculptures and destroys them when the work is ready. Christoph Broich 'Lara', 2005
Christoph Broich will be presented with his latest project 'Voluptuous Panic' in a solo-exhibition from 5 July till 4 august 2007 at Envoy, New York more info: http://www.envoygallery.com
inspired by the book "Gras dat verder groeit-miniaturen - Herbe qui continue à croître -miniatures" from poet Jozef Deleu curator Hermine De Groeve
De kunstenaars : Frans Labath , Karl Mechnig, Sofie Muller, Dany Lobe, Natasja Lefevre, Jan De Wachter, Stefaan Van Biesen, Koen Blanckaert, Nadine Tasseel, Siegfried De Buck, Jean De Groote, Henk Delabie , Johan Clarysse, Marie-Paule Haar, Berrie Van Beers(NL) , Luk Vandervelde, Piet Pollet, Frans Westers(NL), Klaus Baumgärtner, Robine Clignett(NL), Haleh Redjaian(D), Piki & Liesbet Verschueren, Kathleen Sterck & Terry Rozo (USA) ,Jimi Dams(USA), Roeland Tweelinckx, Esther Sluiter (NL)
The last three days of t(h)ree will be celebrated on April 12th from 6-8pm at envoy's Lower East Side location, with a special performance by Jay Brannan at 7.30pm
After parties are at Home Sweet Home (underneath the gallery at 131 Chrystie) from 8-10pm and at Unisex Salon at the Delancey (168 Delancey btw Clinton and Attorney) from 10-4am
Jay Brannan can be seen in the recently released "Shortbus" directed by John Cameron Mitchell. As a singer/songwriter he has performed at a variety of New York City venues including Joe's Pub, the Knitting Factory, Ars Nova, and Galapagos Art Space. In Fall 2005 he performed alongside such artists as Pink, Margaret Cho, Kelly Osbourne, and Alan Cumming at WedRock Los Angeles, a benefit for marriage equality. ENVOY lower east side East Village / Lower East Side 131 Chrystie Street 212-226-4555
here some images from 't(h)ree' at Envoy, lower east side, new york
(A project inspired by John Cameron Mitchell's "Shortbus")
crackerfarm
george duncan
"Shortbus, John Cameron Mitchell's penetrating look at the bruised sexuality of contemporary New Yorkers, lives on in this photography exhibit from Crackerfarm, George Duncan, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya (all part of the film's production team). Though Crackerfarm's intimate images of outsiders posing with "ordinary" citizens keeps close to the film's dual themes of outrageousness and universality, Sepuya's work best captures the Shortbus vision: He's built a treelike structure that reimagines the characters' interconnections as lovers, exes, and friends." — Elizabeth Cline & Michael Alan Connelly for nymag.com
serves as the vehicle for an exhibition which consists of paintings by Amanda Lear and the work of nine contemporary artists.
This international and multidisciplinary exhibition in which the artists are actively involved, reintroduces the childlike games and spirit of the Dada and Surrealist movement by using a popular motive which acts as a playful interrogation of Amanda Lear. Conceptual confusion, symbolic representation and ordered geometry are all part of an ingenuous fragmentation united by nine contemporary artists.
Drawing heavily on what has been written about Amanda Lear, as well as on the images that have been spread worldwide, Amanda Lear served as the wellspring of the imagination and the home of inspiration for the artists.
Continued thought processes and investigations on the subject became a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy has been joined to the everyday rational world in an absolute reality, a punk surreality.
Amanda Lear, Lisa Beck, Christoph Broich, Scott Hug, Michelle Lopez, Gina Magid, Kanshka Raja, AnnaSew Hoy, Ryan Steadman, James J. Wiliams III
envoy . 535 W22nd Street . 6th Fl . New York, NY 10011 . 212.242.7524
1. Dt consists of three separate shows that are shown separately, but co-exist in the same space.
-A show of drawings and mural(s) by Jimi Dams
-A show of portraits by contemporary photographers.
-A show of work by fashion designers.
2. Content wise, Dt is about the nakedness of an artist. How the artist reveals her/ his psyche through her/ his art.
3. Concept wise, the viewer gets a dialogue between:
-Drawing, photography and fashion
-The photographers themselves (as each works in her/his own particular style). This last dialogue is made even more interesting because each photographer used the same nude model, thus taking the term ‘nakedness’ literally.
-The fashion designers, in how they deal with the term ‘nakedness’.
4. To answer a frequently occurring thought with audiences (of what the artist would look like), Dt features the artist of the drawing exhibition as a model for the work of the photography and fashion leg of the exhibition. This way, the viewer is provided with a look into the "soul" of the artists of the drawing leg of the exhibition as well as that of the photographers and fashion designers, by the way they chose to portray / use the artist.
5. To see what the dialogue would be between artists whose work revolves around designing clothes and how they would respond to ‘nakedness’, fashion designers were invited to provide the sculptural element of the project. Their contribution is an intriguing and important part of the show that serves as material for reflection and a motivator for production. It shows that sometimes, the way clothing wraps around a body, tells us more about the body than it conceals.
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installation by Roeland Huys
