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Bijl, Guillaume

accrochage «Struggle(s)» april - june 2012

Guillaume Bijl, born in 1946 in Belgium, lives and works in Antwerp.

Since the end of the seventies Bijl has explored the boundaries separating art and social reality. His inspiration comes from the everyday reality that surrounds him. Much of his work is based on banal, even trivial elements. Bijl’s work can be divided into four categories: the transformation installations (the neutral setting of an art gallery or museum is transformed into an objective, banal and utilitarian reality), the situation installations (concrete interventions in reality, usually part of an art manifestation), the sorry-installations (absurd assemblages of existing objects), and the ‘compositions trouvées’ (compositions of various objects found in reality).

Despite this clear division into categories, most of Bijl’s work belongs to several of them simultaneously. What is important to him is not to create an illusion of reality but to make us aware of the illusionary nature of it, by wrenching reality out of its everyday context and placing it in an unexpected setting.

 
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