Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun (Spotlight)

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Weight (2006), the second film I made of the girl turning, was based on an idea for a sculpture that would continually turn around and it would be alive. I had a whole mechanical sculpture made, but it was just ridiculous. Then I thought I have to do the same with a living girl. [The work shows what appears to be live footage of a legless girl; the top half of her body rotating slowly on a table.] That's how that came about. Most of the film works have to do with sculpture ideas, but they are experiments to me. DdAre the films like moving paintings? For two decades, artist Michaël Borremans has been confounding—and captivating—audiences with his enigmatic paintings. Trained as a draughtsman and engraver at Luca School of Arts in Ghent, followed by several years of photography, it View Bio, Works & Exhibitions a b "Balenciaga under fire again as 'disturbing' Michael Borremans book spotted in ad". HITC. 24 November 2022 . Retrieved 30 November 2022. Created over the last two years during the global pandemic, the eight portraits and seven scenographic compositions in The Acrobat are imbued with pending questions and underlying tensions that operate on multiple registers. Borremans seemingly revisits subject matter from his own body of work, introducing new and varied meanings in every iteration of his mysterious compositions. As the writer Katya Tylevich observes, “Yes, these are paintings made across two years of a global pandemic, and an allegory of isolation leaps out in a puff of confetti. Then again, Borremans’s works have always cautioned against standing too close.” 2 Breitbart conveyed, “The now-canceled spring 2023 ad, the primary subject of which was French actress Isabelle Huppert,includeda book by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans whose paintings often depict children — including castrated children.”

Tylevich, in Michaël Borremans: The Acrobat. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2022), p. 26 Borremans' work at been widely displayed, including a solo showing in Hong Kong of his Fire From the Sun series of paintings, which showed blood-covered toddlers playing in fire and what appeared to be human limbs. MBYes, that's part of the communication you do as an artist. It's not finished. It only exists in the eye of the beholder. DdInitially you were trained as an etcher. What prompted you to shift your focus to painting? What allure does painting hold for you?

In a 2016 interview in art magazine Apollo, Borremans said of his work: "Drawing...offers me the most freedom because it's only pencil and paper and there are no boundaries. You can do whatever you want in a drawing—not in a painting. Not in my case." 'Fire From the Sun' Paintings

Michaël Borremans, Space Vessel I (2017). Bronze and paint. 9.2 x 9.04 x 11.3 cm. Exhibition view: 21 st Biennale of Sydney, Artspace, Sydney (16 March–11 June 2018). Courtesy the artist and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. Photo: Document Photography. DdYou've worked on a number of films in the past. How does your approach to film differ from that to painting? MBIt was overnight. It was like an epiphany. All of a sudden I knew I had to paint. One sudden moment it just came to me that I just had to paint. DdWhat was the first thing you painted? These painters and their technique, they’re most suitable for me and my temperament, because the way you paint has to do with attitude and temperament. That’s why painting continues to remain an interesting medium, because every artist can find his own language in this medium. It’s like a musical instrument. Everybody has to find their own style of playing. And it took me a while to get there. It’s still an evolution, which is interesting of course, because I don’t know how my work will look in ten years or so. It’s an adventure. Borremans, 59, is an acclaimed Belgian painter and filmmaker who was born in Geraardsbergen and lives and works in Ghent. The ruling upheld the PROTECT Act, a 2003 federal law that criminalizes advertising, promoting, presenting or distributing child pornography. Its acronym stands for Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today.The gallery’s presentation at Frieze London 2021 includes a focus on new work by Michaël Borremans, Carol Bove, and Oscar Murillo. The scenes depicted by the majority of paintings comprising Fire from the Sun show a state of being or society in which the primal is uncontrolled, without bearings, in a state of anarchy,” Bracewell writes. “ historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Borremans’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at many prominent institutions. Most recently, Michaël Borremans: Fixture, was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015-2016. A major museum survey, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, which included one hundred works from two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. The exhibition traveled later in the year to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, followed by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2015. The previous year, Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist’s first museum solo show in Japan, was on view at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Fire from the Sun, one of the themes, depicts naked toddlers and young children who seem to have ended up in a strange ritual. It is unclear whether they have been smeared with paint or blood, but there is an unmistakable hint of cannibalism. The works combine horror and innocence in the shape of children. Fire from the Sun refers to natural primal forces but also to human urges and humanity’s animal nature. In 2011, Borremans' work was the subject of a solo exhibition, titled Eating the Beard, which was first on view at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart in Germany and traveled to Műcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, and Kunsthalle Helsinki in Finland. In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, and in 2009, he had a solo show at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, Germany [5] There has always been something not entirely of this world about Borremans' works. His paintings depict figures sometimes incomplete with limbs or heads missing, frozen mid gesture, seemingly swaying or dancing to unheard music or engaging in some sinister ritual. They are unsettling, eluding comprehension. His portraits—if they can be called such—tell nothing of the sitter. Borremans uses the language of portraiture to draw in the viewer but then subverts our expectations and understanding of the works. The painted figure is beside the point, more absent than present, an object to be posed and deciphered like a riddle, rather than a subject with a story. MBThere is an analogy with rituals, but it's never really clear, it's not specified. That's important for me in my work, to not define anything, to allow for different analogies so everybody can relate to it in a different way. DdYou ascribe a lot of importance to the viewer in completing the narrative.Balenciaga has come under fire for its Balenciaga Objects collection ad campaign, titled "Balenciaga Gift Shop," that was shot by Gabriele Galimberti. The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence.