ANNE-MIE VAN KERCKHOVEN
2022-01-03Zeno X Gallery presents the retrospective exhibition Placenta Saturnine Bercail by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951 in Antwerp). Historical and new works illustrate her forty-year collaboration with Zeno X Gallery. A substantial publication presenting an overview of all her exhibitions in the gallery with images from the archive will be released to coincide with this exhibition.
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has collected a large database of images of women in various stages of undress. The poses, gazes, attributes and camera angles are usually very stereotypical. These clichés are occasions for her to connect the underlying meanings of the images with other, sociopolitical dimensions of society. Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven likes to look for the tension between word and image. Since images of women are regularly used to sell certain goods, Van Kerckhoven got the idea to also sell abstract ideas or concepts by juxtaposing them with images of women: “As my alter ego ‘HeadNurse’, I took ninety-six female images from my database and connected them with words from texts on internal self-organization, thermodynamics and knowledge representation. Through the systematic use and reuse of images of women – from the first nude magazines to the sexual revolution– I activated a five-step alchemical process, starting from thinkers in the baroque to Nietzsche.”
Opposite – Spiegel (Mirror), 1987
Exhibition runs through to February 26th, 2022
Zeno X Gallery
Godtsstraat 15
2140 Antwerp
Belgium
