art brussels 2025
gudrun piper, leon polk smith, jeffrey steele, yoko terauchi
april 24 – 27, 2025
art brusselsbooth 5e-05
hall 5, brussels expo
place de la belgique 1, 1020 brussels
view of installation: art brussels 2025
photos: graysc
grudrun piper, "skala in schwarz" (1980), pencil and indian ink on cardboard, 102 × 50 cm; "serielle elemente schwarz x" and "serielle elemente schwarz ix" (1977), acrylic paint and pencil on wood, 49.5 × 49.5 cm
leon polk smith, "long journey" (1979, two-part), collage, paper on pasteboard, 135 × 102 cm; yoko terauchi, "hot line 63" (1986), telephone cable, 154 × 42 × 42 cm
gudrun piper, "quadriga 3b" and "quadriga 1b" (1987), oilpaint and acrylic paint on wood, 64.5 × 64.5 cm; jeffrey steele, "peccavi" (1967-69), oilpaint and graphit on canvas, 137 × 206 cm
art brussels 2025
many of the (historical) positions edition & galerie hoffmann represents had their most active, scene-building and programmatic years in the two decades following the gallery's foundation in 1967. the gallery's attempt to democratize the access to contemporary art, its historical contexts and affordable collectorship through the production of limited edition prints and portfolios has its roots then. their studies at the institut für sozialforschung in frankfurt equipped the two gallery founders with a necessary sensibility to avoid the reactionary 'stunde null'-zero-group-type of german post-war formalism. the positions for '68 forward as part of art brussels 2025 can be read as employing materialist ontological approaches: the category of reflection as a metaphor for a structure of being instead of a sensual-material process. reflection was to model the interrelatedness of material multiplicity as a universal system of 'widerspiegelung' and to ground the specificity of the human being-in-the-world as a moment of the general relationship to nature. the works selected for presentation at art brussels represent cross-sections from post-war positivism toward cybernetics and perception theory, through a recourse to constructivism, neo-plasticism and mondrian, and literal cross-sections of the material means of communication. or (post-)modernism in a nutshell.
gudrun piper
gudrun piper sets up the rules from where dynamics of its own develop, and series of works are produced. what many artists dreamed of, piper seems to have managed – to put an art-machine to work. in between mathematical predetermination and aesthetic systematics. her work is not about mere compliance, but about fulfilling the rules of a system as long as they allow forms and lines to be repeated according to a certain principle. the artist, like many the gallery worked with, practices on paths that, as the artists hoped, would lead them to being able to evade subjectivity and authorship. more or less questionable, as one might reflect upon today, but a step at a time when ideas in relation to cybernetics meant (social) progress. gudrun piper's work is represented as part of public art collections such as i.e. städtisches museum abteiberg, sammlung etzold, mönchengladbach; hamburger kunsthalle; museum ritter, waldenbruch; kunsthalle kiel; sammlung daimler, berlin.
gudrun piper & max mahlmann, "stufenpermutation 71" (1971), public art, herderschule, lüneburg, germany
gudrun piper & max mahlmann, "lichtpermutation 71-73" (1971-73), public art, congress centrum, hamburg, germany
leon polk smith
the names of two of leon polk smith's main groups of works, "correspondence series" and "constellation series," provide central points of reference to the understanding of his oeuvre. from a biographical perspective, these titles also describe in a figurative sense the field of tension between his half native american origin in the horizontal vastness of the chickasaw nation in oklahoma and his later life from the mid-1940s onward in new york with its vertical cityscape. during his lifetime, the gallery has realized multiple solo exhibitions with the artist and four artist portfolios. at art brussels, collages that were the basis for these collaborations in the 1970s and 1980s will be on display. leon polk smith's work is represented as part of most major public art collections internationally i.e. brooklyn museum; art institute chicago; guggenheim museum, new york; moca, los angeles; mumok, vienna; neue nationalgalerie, berlin; whitney museum of american art, new york.
jeffrey steele
jeffrey steele was the intellectual center and co-founder of the british systems group in the early 1970s. his role, besides being a visual artist, as an organizer, translator and writer as part of a constructivist artists' group in post-war europe made him a frequent collaborator in collective projects with edition & galerie hoffmann. the work we selected for the fair is a painting executed during a time when steele was realizing the public art project “domenico” as part of an initiative by the welsh arts counsel in 1967-68. separated from the institutional structures of the artist's social environment or milieu, the billboard sized screen prints, devoid of any meaning, quality, or attributes other than the singular quality of being an artwork, failed tremendously – in terms of its public acceptance. steele's work was exhibited internationally at i.e. the moma, new york (1965); the venice biennale (1986); the whitechapel gallery, london (2015); and is represented as part of all major british public art collections i.e. tate; victoria and albert museum; british museum (all london).
view of installation: jeffrey steele, "domenico" (1967-68), screen print, in situ
yoko terauchi
yoko terauchi's cycle of works “hot line” was produced during her time in the uk in the 1980s, using industrial telephone cables. it represents a rare group of works that are not site specific in the sense, that they are removable from the place of their initial display. still – following terauchi's statement from an exhibition at the gallery in 1991 – wherever abbreviations of these works were on display, they certainly represent a spatial relation: the relativity of inside and outside, a binary relationship the artist tries to resist, and identifies as western philosophy's cartesian-fetishism with dualisms. at the fair, we would like to present works from that cycle of works, being additionally able to offer the realization of site specific installations based on concepts from the 1980s and 1990s. yoko terauchi's work was the subject of solo and group exhibitions at i.e. serpentine gallery/hayward gallery (1983); south london gallery (solo, 1985); chisenhale gallery (solo, 1994) – all london; städtisches museum abteiberg, mönchengladbach (solo, 1992); museum of contemporary art tokyo (2019); toyota municipal museum of art (solo, 2021), busan biennale (2024).
view of installation: yoko terauchi, "air castle" (1994), graphite on wall, dimensions unmeasurable at chisenhale gallery, london
imaginary form of the work "air castle" as a whole. the chisenhale gallery itself is only a small part of the much larger object which remains unseen.
view of installation: yoko terauchi, "one is many many is one" (2022), installation, paper, plaster, 67 × 392 × 435 cm
yoko terauchi, "hot line 16" (1984), telephone cable, 90 × 88 × 50 cm
yoko terauchi "hot line 69" (1986), telephone cable, 68 × 54 × 43 cm
yoko terauchi "hot line 63" (1986), telephone cable, 150 × 42 × 42 cm
works
