Benoit Gob
Né à Liége (Belgium), 1972
Vit et travaille à Bruxelles
Preview 2013
The Universes of Benoit Gob
Riffels and wrinkles, lines and ridges, variations of pink. Human bowels, secret cracks and clefts, fleshy entities, folds of silk,
stunningly beautiful and confusing.
Black and white landscapes, like blurred photographs. Infinite views open up to the recipient. Futuristic structure, fighting machines or mobile, consisting of detached body parts and flashing metal, sticked on colored background.
Shriveled papier mache heads stored in glass falls - an excerpt from a pathology museum. Rooms, busy with tiny aliens, or fungi, or microbes. They overgrow furnitures, walls, floor and ceiling. They move, they breathe. Machines, their usefulness not obvious, growing forms such as ulcers.
Shirts, dancing through space without support, without people, completely autonomous. All so antithetic, it still is strictly connected to each other - the universes of Benoit Gob, who himself not arranged to a genre.
He is actor, performer and dancer, paints, creates collages, designs and builds machines and sprawling installations.
Benoit Gob smashes wellknown forms, defragmentes, selects, assembles.
Structures some dissolve compositions,
a reference to the artist’s interest in natural sciences, in which structures play the largest role.
Structure creates balance.
Compositions, centering on nondescriptive structure and neverthless give an impression of movement.
Composition creates movement.
Benoit Gob slides between genres. He creates with scientific curiosity parallel worlds. Variations of life and art, film,
stop by and movements in close up and long shots.
He slam-dunks into science, technology, nature, mechanics, apparently contrasting turn humorous, sometimes ironic,.
Ties points to artists such as Heinz Mack, Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaists and Surrealists are everywhere,
but the artist goes one step further and attempts a synthesis of all these trends.
Benoit Gob is a thinker, inventor, designer, sampler. Again and again he renewes his position, changes his perspective,
reflects his experiences and invents new world for us.
Pink series 2010
"….I would like to start with a short history of the – at first sight – rather straightforward collage technique, which is very much contemporary. Collages and assemblages entered the Fine Arts at the end of the Belle Epoque. At the beginning of the 20th century, cubists such as Picasso and Braque integrated templates of letters and figures in their canvases. But the actual assemblage and photographic collage we owe to Dadaïsm. Duchamp and other Dadaists wanted to dismantle the existing bourgeois culture. The unnoble, ordinary materials that they used for their ready-mades, assemblages and collages proved to be the right medium. At that time, the public was shocked by the recognizability of the ‘vulgar’ objects. From Dadaism sprang Surrealism and later Pop-art and Nouveau-Realism, which brought collages and assemblages to full bloom. Collage can therefore be seen as one of the main artistic threads throughout the 20th Century and is still flourishing today, in our 21st ‘cut and paste’ century.
…
Two revealing worlds meet in the world of Gob. On the one hand there are the heavily symbolic collages referring to an extreme world veiled by materialism. Entities are built from jewels, skulls, sexy snake skins, crowns and cut-up porn stars yelling for attention in pop-artlike aggressive forms. They are brilliant and form an aesthetic beauty. But when looked at closely, they comment subtly on a culture where loaded guns and capitalism degrade the big themes of love and death to fancy pictures devoid of humanity. Sculptures of human skin are contained in glass bubbles, with a view on the lifeless tailored suit with a falling knife. And still, I cannot shake the idea that Benoît Gob gives this materialistic (pop)-art culture a pleasant, light, careless touch. The end of an era that had no choice. But Benoîts language is not that of a patient man. His fantasy gives him the opportunity to create a futuristic surrealist world. A world of cyborgs and fleshy entities mutated by biotechnology and genetics floating around in a Big Bang-context. The skins of hundreds of porn stars and body builders become hybrid forms, melting with the remains of a highly technological industrial society, in a world where only poetry triumphs."
Sven Vanderstichelen
Études
1995-1998
Etudes de théâtre à l’Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle (INSAS) à Bruxelles
1991-1995
Etudes de peinture à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Liège
1989-1991
Etudes général artistique à l’Académie des beaux- Arts de Liège
1986-1989
Etudes d’électricité et mécanique au Lycée Renée Leruth, Liège
Expositions
2010
ITHAKA "XX+XY", Exhibition commune, Leuven, BE
2009
Truc Troc, au Cercle des Beaux arts de Bruxelles
Solo Show, Ottilia Pribilla Gallery, Antwerpen
2008
Solo Show, “Cher, chair, share” Freemen Gallery, Holland,NL
Group Shows, Canvas Collection, BOZAR, Bruxelles
2006
concours Médiatine, Exhibition commune, Bruxelles
Théâtre
2010
This door is to small for a bear, Grace Ellen Barkey/Needcompany, Première Kaaitheater, Bruxelles. Tournée mondiale
The deer house, Jan Lauwers/Needcompany. Tournée mondiale
The sad face/happy face Trilogy, Jan Lauwers/Needcompany. Tournée mondiale
2008-2009
The deer house, mise en scène Jan Lauwers, needcompany, Salzbourg, tournée mondiale
The sad/happy face trilogie, mise en scène Jan Lauwers, Salzbourg, tournée mondial
The Porcelain project, création de Grace Ellen Barkey
2007
The Porcelain project, création de Grace Ellen Barkey, Needcompany, Kaaitheater, Bruxelles. Tournée mondiale.
Le bazard du homard, mise en scène de Jan Lauwers, tournée mondiale
Isabella’s room, Chunking, tournée mondial
2006
Le bazard du homard, mise en scène de Jan Lauwers, tournée mondiale
Isabella’s room, tournée mondial
Chunking, tournée mondial
2005
Needlapb, Festival d’Avignon.
Chunking, création de Grace Ellen Barkey/Needcompany, tournée mondiale
Isabella’s room, Chunking, tournée mondial
2004
Needlapb, création de la Needcompany, théâtre de la Bastille, Paris, Schauspielhaus, Hamburg,Vooruit, Gand.
Chunking, création de Grace Ellen Barkey/Needcompany, tournée mondiale
Isabella’s room, mise en scène de Jan Lauwers,Needcompany, première mondiale festival d’Avignon in, juillet tournée mondial
Images of affection, mise en scène de Jan Lauwers /Needcompany (reprise de rôle ; tournée mondiale).
And, tournée mondiale.
2003
Images of affection, mise en scène de Jan Lauwers /Needcompany (reprise de rôle ; tournée mondiale).
Needlapb, création de la Needcompany, Stuk, Louvain-la-neuve.
Needlapb, création de la Needcompany, Kaaitheater, Bruxelles.
It, chorégraphie de Wim Vandekeybus, interprétation de Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, voix Benoît Gob, Les Ballets C. de la B/ Ultima vez, festival d’Avignon in.
2002
And, mise en scène de Grace Ellen Barkey /Needcompany, première mondiale à Amsterdam.
Les aveux, mise en scène de Anne Thuot, compagnie du dehors, Clos Cacao, Bruxelles.
2001
Inasmuch as life is borrowed, tournée mondiale.
2000
Inasmuch as life is borrowed, chorégraphie et mise en scène de Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima vez, Single, Anvers.
In spite of wishing and wanting, tournée mondiale.
1999
In spite of wishing and wanting, chorégraphie et mise en scène de Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima vez, teatro communale di Ferrara, Italie.
Top dogs, KVS, Bruxelles (reprise).
1998
The day of heaven and hell, mise en scène de Wim Vandekeybus et Franz Marijnen /Ultima vez /KVS, Bruxelles.
Top dogs, mise en scène de Franz Marijnen /Koninklijke vlaamse schouwburg, Bruxelles.