M is looking forward to Peter Buggenhout and Silver

2015 will be filled with a new mix of classical and contemporary art exhibitions. Note down the following exhibition openings and press conferences on your calendar.

SILVER art |object | story

12.02.2015 >< 12.07.2015  |  Press conference & opening on 11.02.2015

Five centuries of valuable silver will be given a place of honour at M. Luxury tableware, religious objects and other surprising silverwork tell a story about the rich history of Leuven and Brabant. From Gothic to art deco, you will see an overview of glittering creations commissioned by the city, her affluent citizens, guilds, university, churches and abbeys.

SILVER showcases Leuven’s silverwork, such as the key to the city and the mayor’s silver inkwell, rare design sketches, ceremonial guild silverware and – what else would you expect in Leuven – richly decorated beer mugs. The exhibitions presents showpieces such as the oldest windmill cup in the world and a glittering ensemble of silver gifts for the primus of the university. Each of the pieces reflects the prestige of the annual university competition that was held in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In addition to the medieval treasures of liturgical silverware, you can discover the colourful designs of the monk-silversmith Dom Martin. In the 1920s and 30s, his unique style garnered worldwide fame. After more than eighty years, his art deco gems are returning to Leuven temporarily.

Organised in collaboration with the Silver Museum of the Province of Antwerp.

Jessica Warboys. Glades.

12.02.2014 >< 24.05.2015  |  Opening on 11.02.2015

Jessica Warboys (1977, United Kingdom) uses nature as her studio and archive, and bases her works on personal or collective memories. This deeply romantic method earned her comparisons to William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich in The Guardian. At M, Warboys presents a new selection of works, including Sea Paintings, Box Paintings, cyanotypes and the video ‘Shaded Wood’.

The Sea Paintings are central to Warboys’ oeuvre. Warboys folds up a large canvas, places pigment on the inside, and then places the canvas in the sea. In this performance, the waves and flowing of the sea leave their mark on the work. The end result is an open-ended, distended canvas that is open to infinite interpretations. For her cyanotypes, she places objects on a photosensitive canvas and then exposes it to the sun, creating Prussian blue cyanotypes. In the video Shaded Wood, storylines develop in wooded surroundings – a mystery that you gradually resolve.

Peter Buggenhout

12.03.2015 >< 31.05.2015  | Press conference & opening on 11.03.2015

Peter Buggenhout (°1963, Dendermonde) presents a retrospective of his works from the past decade at M. Over the past few years, he exhibited at an impressive range of museums, including MoMA/PS1 New York, Palais de Tokyo in Parijs, Frankfurter Kunstverein and De Pont Tilburg.

Buggenhout creates colossal installations and sculptures on plinths. He sues refuse, industrial materials, horsehair, entrails, large and small residual materials. What at first appears to be a random pile of materials is in fact a carefully composed chaos. This gives his works an anonymous and unrememberable quality. You get the impression that Buggenhout has turned his sculptures inside out. They appear both raw and dilapidated, and yet attractive and repulsive at the same time. The result is a fragile and uncomfortable beauty.

In addition to smaller works on plinths and metres-high dust sculptures, you will also see two new installations that introduce new materials. Parallel to the exhibition, the volume ‘we did it before and we can do it again’ is being published. Texts and images are alternated with a selection of Buggenhout’s sources of inspiration, such as Francesco Petrarca, Sydney Pollack, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christopher Nolan and the earthquake in Haiti.

The Tervuren School

25.06.2015 >< 13.09.2015  |  Press conference & opening on 24.06.2015

The missing link between romanticism and impressionism. This is the legacy of the Tervuren School, an artists’ colony that was founded circa 1870 around the leading figure Hippolyte Boulenger. These new talents abandoned the studio and took their palettes and easels out in the middle of nature, making a radical choice for realism. They thus redefined Belgian landscape painting forever.

Sarah Morris

22.10.2015 >< 24.01.2016  |  Press conference & opening on 21.10.2015

Sarah Morris (1967, United Kingdom) uses video and abstract painting to portray the contradictions, complexity and psychology of the metropolis. With lively styles and compositions, you can recognise the architectural patterns of big cities on her canvasses. Her film work shifts our focus to life in big cities. Bursting with seductive colour, the recent work Rio sketches beaches, favelas, the carnival parade, football stadiums, etc.