Barbara Seiler

In his third solo exhibition at Barbara Seiler Belgian/Swiss artist Ante Timmermans presents his latest drawings on wood panels. They follow up on his perfomative installation )pause( presented at Frieze London 2014, which reflected upon the absurdity, the tragedy and comedy of progressive movement during a ceaseless standstill. In this solo projected the walls of the booth were covered with large text drawings that referred to the stage directions of the play ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett – a play in which the two characters wait endlessly for the arrival of someone named Godot. Throughout the entire fair five dancers performed the directions of pause, understood as a physical and mental state in which each of them had the freedom to choose between standing still or moving on. Sculptural objects referring to this in-between state served as focus point and mirrored the performative installation.

For this solo exhibition at Barbara Seiler Timmermans concentrates on his personal moving standstill that he had experienced during the five days in London on which )pause( had been enacted by the five dancers. He reflects upon the recurring theme of the nature of absurdity, this time however not in context of bureaucratic systems and controls mechanisms like in ‘Métro-Boulot-Dodo’ or ‘Make a Molehill out of a Mountain (of work)’ but refers the subject to his own persona, the homo nonsense as an absurd human.

The donkey as the ever-working beast of burden plays a central role in Timmermans work. In the composition ‚ICHTS‘ Timmermans arranges a confrontation between the donkey and a human head facing each other. It refers to the text ‚Geständnis von ein Lastdier‘ that Timmermans wrote for the publication )pause( for Frieze London 2014, a text that plays with the meanings of ‘nichts’ (nothing) and ‘ichts’, which in Flemish means ‘something’. In ‘Geköpft’, another large drawing on wood panel, the artist uses text and language by layering different types of paint – oil and acrylic – to then scratching the text into the paint thus embedding the text into the painting.

Ante Timmermans (*1976 in Ninove, BE) lives in Zurich, CH and Gent, BE. His work has been the subject of exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas and includes solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (Switzerland) 2012, Musée Jenisch in Vevey (Switzerland) 2012, Kunsthal Sao Paulo (Brasil) 2014, and group exhibitions at CIAP in Hasselt (Belgium) 2013, SMAK in Gent (Belgium) 2012, Aargauer Kunsthaus (Switzerland) 2011 and Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort (Netherlands) 2011 among others. He participated in Manifesta 9 in Genk (Belgium) 2012 and represented Belgium at the 13th Architecture Biennale Venice (Italy) 2012. In 2015 he will have major solo exhibitions at Be-Part, Waregem (Belgium) and at the GEM (Gemeentemuseum) in Den Haag (Netherlands).