Annie Gentils Gallery

ANNIE GENTILS GALLERY

Peter Benoitstraat 40, B – 2018 Antwerpen, Belgium

www.anniegentilsgallery.com

T: +32 (0)3 216 30 28    M:  +32 (0)477 756 721    E: mail@anniegentilsgallery.com

 

 CV – Elke Andreas Boon

° Gent – 1969

Lives and works in Ghent

 

- Elke Andreas Boon (Ghent, Belgium) uses different media to create installations. By assembling her photos, drawings, videos, and sculptures, she creates an environment where hyper -individualistic feelings are sublimated into a sense of ephemeral beauty. The base of Boon’s work is formed by her innate fascination with people, their connections, their emotions and uncertainties. Tensions created in answering to or escaping from patterns of social expectations, which revolve around age, beauty or gender always recur in Boon’s work. As an artist, her power lies in locating the sensitivities that define us as human, laying them bare, and raising them to a level of aesthetic awareness. After an initially beautiful, often sensual impression of her creations, another reality can soon surface, confronting the spectator with an indeterminate doubt about human fate. Her work couples a poetic and escapist imagination with a raw vision on our human condition. Her work thus bears witness to a very personal sensibility, lightness and nimbleness. It is not the illustration of an idea, but the result of multiple and diverse impulses that form an ambiguous whole. For Elke Andreas Boon, artistry is a radical choice for freedom, an attempt to go beyond the tethering of social structures. Thanks to her imagination and rebellious attitude towards life, she succeeds in challenging rusted patterns, generating new insights on what it is to be human.

Permissions, Prohibitions and the Perplexing Present

Elke Andreas Boon’s art is engaged with observations of daily life and personal history. Her multiplatform projects and installations include videos, photography, paintings, drawings and sculpture. The subject matter in each work dictates the form and language she uses to express her ways of reading the world and her engagement with it.
As the artist says, “I look at the world and I see the constraints of all of the systems, traditions and dogmas. They organize and torment us at the same time, keeping us from reaching our full potential.” In her work, feeling is paramount and becomes the force that guides an insightful analysis and stinging critique of political, religious, economic and societal relationships. Boon is an artist who looks at life and in her urge to understand its shape and dimension she finds hopes through reform, rebellion and resisting expectations.

Initially gaining attention and notoriety for her sensitive, often nude, photographic portraits, it’s impossible to grasp the breadth of this artist’s worldview without taking into account the comprehensive scope of her work. Her work demands that the audience engage with the full oeuvre to understand and appreciate her explorations into the construction of identity in the present day. Her work confronts the questions, “How do we belong?” “How do we survive?” “How do we turn pain and hurting into healing?” “In the face of suffering, how do you understand empathy?” It feels natural that this multidimensional artist should communicate across platforms, as it matches the myriad possibilities we have to express the complexities of modern life.

Every drawing, painting, sculpture, video and photograph is a window that offers a visual of her perspective on life. To see the full breadth, you must take a step back and see the entire house. Every experience is full of beauty and hardness too; there is struggle and sublime hope; there is injustice and yet the search for identity is the strongest force in the universe, but will it prevail?

Her work gravitates toward an exploration of permissions (what we are allowed to do), prohibitions (what we are not allowed to do) and the consistently changing hardships we face in the modern world (the perplexing present). What does it mean to be alive today?

From within these expectations, forces that seek to constrain creativity, voices and human will control the patterns of life.

In one example of her work, with a purposeful delicacy, she has drawn a tattered cityscape, a landscape perspective of a city ravaged by war. This intricate drawing traces the outlines of the architecture and possibly what remains. Like most of Boon’s work, it challenges the viewer to look closely and examine the codes and presumptions we make when visually scrutinizing the world. Is the city destroyed, or is it being rebuilt by the sensitive insight of the artist’s hand? The drawing itself is beautiful and therein lies part of the contradiction, because war is not beautiful. But here, she has created or re-created a world of beauty, and one that’s worth fighting for, even when that fighting leads to so much destruction. Within softness, there is rebellion at work.

The recurrent theme in Boon’s work is her exploration of the human condition and her fascination with humanity—the sensitivity of our condition, the frailty of human life and the immeasurable creative will we have to exist within the powerful systems that control our daily lives.

In another work, she explores coding through the every day object of the sheet, that thin cover we use to keep us warm at night. Through a subtle change of placement and urging the viewer to look and look again, a slight move of the sheet from above and below the head reveals the short distance between what we understand to be a state of sleep and a state of death. The distance between silence, soft sounds and shrieking isn’t so far after all. Her work encourages multiple viewings and news ways of looking at the same thing twice.

As an artist, she communicates what is essentially the most important thing we require of all artists: that they possess the innate urge to understand things and the talent to express this understanding and share it with the world as though we are seeing it for the first time.

(Michael Gardner, May 2015)

 

EDUCATION

- LUCA School of Arts – Ghent
- KASK - Ghent

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AWARDS

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2017 -  LOOP Barcelona – Amister Award – with video “Me & My Sister”

2000 - Prijs van de fotografie Guislain, Gent, Belgium

1997 - Eerste Prijs Provenciale Prijs, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

1996  - Eerste prijs Kunstensalon, Gent, Belgium

            - Provinciale Prijs Fotografie Antwerpen, Belgium

1995  - Prijs van de Jury, Patershol, Gent, Belgium

1994  - Franciscus Pycke - Best Student - Gent

 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2018 – On a mange tout le Chocolat, Annie Gentils Gallery

         - Solo presentation Art Rotterdam – Annie Gentils Gallery

2017 – LOOP Barcelona – Me and my Sister – Annie Gentils Gallery

2016 -  Blue sea/white paper - Light-cube, Ronse, (BE)

2015 -  Elke Andreas Boon - 01/05 Salon Blanc - Romestraat 30, Oostende (BE)

2014  -  ‘No Pain, No Gain’ (curated by Stef Van Bellingen), Light-cube, Ronse, (BE)

2012  -"Cotton, black-white, color, on paper’ -  CCHA, Hasselt, (BE)
           -  Elke Andreas Boon -  MX7, Antwerp, (BE)

2011  - ‘Rock / Paper / Scissors - Les Brasseurs, Liège, (BE)  

          - Picture This - Elke Andreas Boon - Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, (BE)

            - ‘Insight’ , FOMU - Photo Museum Antwerp, (BE)

2010  -  Stiches and Images - Camara Oscura, Madrid, Spain.

2009  - Stiches and Images - Stieglitz 19, Antwerp, (BE)

2007  - Intervention 1 - Dumas Ghent,  (BE)

2005  - Honger  - Reading -  Victoria, Ghent , (BE)

2004  - Elke Andreas Boon/Germaine Greer - Abc 2004, Antwerp, (BE)

2003  - Below and opposite, Left top, right Bottom - Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (NL)
          - Artist in Residence, Sint Lukas - Brussels, (BE)

2002  - Vlekken en Schuim - Witte Zaal, Ghent, (BE)
          - Monologen -  Addict  - Brussels, (BE)
          - Bunker living installation - Vooruit - Ghent, (BE)
          - Artist in Residence -  Ecole des beaux Arts Perpignan, (Fr.)

2001  - Elke Andreas Boon - Lokaal 01, Antwerp, (BE)
          - Elke Andreas Boon - TENT Witte De Wit, Rotterdam, (NL)

2000   - R4 1997 -  Richard Foncke Gallery, Ghent, (BE)

1999   - Virginie -  Oude Coca-Cola Fabriek, Roeselare, (BE)

1997   - KVS, Brussels, (BE)
           - De Vereniging, SMAK - Gent, (BE)

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2017 - 2018 – Ecce Homo – Geukens & Devil, Antwerpen

2017 - 2018 – Prijs Beeldende Kunst 1997 – 2017, Roger Raveelmuseum, Machelen - Zulte     

2017 - ART ROTTERDAM PROJECTIONS & MAIN BOOTH - Annie Gentils Gallery,        Rotterdam (NL)
          -  Je ne sais quoi - Emergent - Veurne – Belgium
          -  My feminin Ways- galerie EL, Welle - Belgium         

2016  - AMSTERDAM ART FAIR 2016, Annie Gentils Gallery
          - INTERGALACTIC DUST ( Keiko Sato - Marie Cloquet - Hana Miletic - Goele .   De Bruyn - Bernaded Dexters - Elke Andreas Boon)- Annie Gentils                       Gallery,             Antwerp, (BE)

2015  - SPIEGELINGEN / ZELFPORTRETTEN -  Cultuurcentrum De Steiger, Menen,      BE
          - Salon Blanc - Elke Andreas Boon - Romestraat 30, Oostende, (BE)
          - OCCUPIED EMOTIONS - BUBOX, Kortrijk, (BE)

2014  - UMLAND, Villa de Olmen, Wieze (BE) / - CC Belgica  Huis Van Winckel,             Dendermonde, (BE)
          - CONSPIRACY OF WOMEN - Cámara oscura, Madrid, Spain
          - FEMALE CREATORS - ( curated by Marisa Oropesa) - Palacio del Almudi,          Murcia, Spain

2013  - Kortrijk Vlaandert, Kortrijk, Belgium
          - Museum to scale - ( by Ronny Van de Velde) - Royal Museum of Fine Arts,       Brussels, (BE)

2012   - Cotton, black-white, color, on paper - CCHA, Hasselt, (BE)
             - Plastic, sand, black/white print on paper - MX7, Antwerp, (BE)           -                         - Estampa Art Fair, within the framework of the "Cineteca                       Project" - (curated               by Angie Bonino), Madrid

2011  - DEPTH OF FIELD - Guangdong Museum of Art, China
            - WATOU, Belgium

2009  - Descubrimientos -  Photo España - Madrid, Spain
          - Bienale de Photographie dans la Condroz, Marchin , (BE)

2008  - After hours - Point OE - Askim Culture House, Askim, Norway.
          -  Annie aime la video’- Art Centre (l’Ecole Brousse) in collaboration with             FRAC Languedoc, Montpellier, (FR)
          -  Fantasy, Galerie ‘Les Filles du Calvaire’ - Paris, (FR)
            - Generations, Galerie ' Filles du Calvaire’ -  Brussels, (BE)
            - Paulo post futurum - Lokaal 01, Breda, (NL)
 

2007  - Multi plier - Galerie ' Filles du Calvaire’ -  Brussels, (BE)
            - Conduire à toute allure dans un paysage ralenti, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch –         (FR)

2006  - PIJN : Performance - Museum Guislain, Gent - (BE)
          - Driving fast through a slow motion landscape, Espai Ubu – Barcelona, Spain

2005  - Belgische fotografie - Fotomuseum, Antwerpen,  (BE)
          - For crying out loud : Performance SUPER -  (Curated by Edith Doove) - CC       Hasselt, (BE)
2004  - Ename 2004, PAM -  Ename - (Curated by Edith Doove),   Ename-         Oudenaarde, (BE)
 

2003  - Synesthetics - CC Mechelen , Mechelen, (BE)
          - Switch - Museum D'Hondt Dhaenens ( MDD), Deurle, (BE)
          - Double Exposior ( curated by Veerle van Durme) - ING , Kortrijk, (BE)
          - The 2nd annual  Detroit International Video Festival, The Museum of New Art   (MONA), Detroit, US
 

2002  - Embodyment - De Brakke grond + De Balie, Amsterdam, (NL)
          - Ballet C.de la B. - (curated by Hans Martens), Amsterdam, (NL)
          - Le plat pays - ( Curated by Hilde Teerlinck ) - Halle au Poisson, Perpignan (FR)
          - Je t’aime …moi non plus - (Curated by Hilde Teerlinck) - Kunst Hall Bergen -   Norway / Het Domein Sittard (NL) / Esap Perpignan (Fr) / Leisure club             Mogadihni (Copenhagen) / Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (D)
          - Akihabara TV-03 third international city video installation - Tokyo, Japan
          - Interference : locations in memory and time - Elke Boon -  Dirk Braekman -      David Claerbout  - (Curated by Hans Martens & Cis Bierinckx ) -  Fri-               Art - Fribourg, Switzerland

2001  - Interference : Locations in memory and time Elke Boon -  Dirk Braekman -        David Claerbout , (Curated by Hans Martens & Cis Bierinckx ) - Galerie             Fotohof, Salzburg – Austria
          - 10 Paar ( curated by Veerle van Durme) - Kuressaare, Estland /Kuurne (BE)
          - Interference :  Locations in memory and time Elke Boon -  Dirk Braekman -      David Claerbout, - (curated by Hans Martens & Cis Bierinckx) -                         Limerick City  Gallery of  Art - Ireland
          - Strange Fruits - Espace 251 Nord, Liège (BE)

2000  - Interference : locations in memory and time -  Elke Boon -  Dirk Braekman -      David Claerbout - (Curated by Hans Martens & Cis Bierinckx ) - Fri-                Art, Fribourg, Switzerland

           - Sculptura - Blauwhuis, Izegem, (BE)
          - Provinciale Prijs Beeldende Kunst Provincie Oost-Vlaanderen ,Ghent, (BE)
          - De beurs van Jodocus Vijdt - (curated by Jan Hoet) - Bijlokemuseum, Ghent,   (BE) 

1999  - Aspects de l’ art actuel en Belgique  - (curated by Veerle van Durme) -
            FRAC Nord - Pas de Calais, (FR)
          - Pica in Flandres -  Galeria Ferran Cano, Barcelona, Spain

1997  - Provinciale prijs Fotografie - Museum van Fotografie, Antwerpen, (BE)

1996  - De Rode Poort, (curated by Jan Hoet) - SMAK, Ghent, (BE)

 

 

PUBLICATIONS
Monologen, 2002 Ludion (photographic works)