Peter Buggenhout finds a haven under Hilario Galguera’s roof in Madrid to present his first solo exhibition “A Dog with Eyes for the Blind”.
Related articles: Skylines & Horizons, Dark Back of Time in "El cuarto de máquinas"
Galería Hilario Galguera starts the season with the opening of the exhibition A Dog with Eyes for the Blind by artist Peter Buggenhout in their Madrid Venue.
Peter Buggenhout (Dendermonde, Belgium, 1963) uses a philosophical approach which aim is to deepen different concepts and to create artworks that express vital aspects of contemporary existence such as decadence, accumulation, ambiguity, and obliteration. Peter Buggenhout's sculptures are a combination of oblivions and wastelands. The large-sized sculptures interact with their physical spaces to respond to an internal logic. What first seems as chaotic and profound, is a detailed process that transforms the abject into an aesthetic experience. As Buggenhout often makes the most of discarded objects and elements, maybe found as insignificant or unstable like dust or debris, his artworks generate a concentration of inaccessible information, or accessible information but only in part. The bodies of work take titles that refer to the construction process and the materials used.
The capacious sculptures are an archeological representation of western cultures, acting as evidence and a predicament to the current tendencies of fast and easy consumption. However, Buggenhout aims to give hope to the watcher in this first solo exhibition, by calling it “A Dog with Eyes for the Blind”, where art implies a form of life and a promise of rebirth, where ceasing to see does not end to passing away.
The solo exhibition will be convoyed by a text by Alfredo Félix-Díaz, as follows a thread of it; “At times it seems like an act of compassion: to save a place for error, oblivion, waste. And at times it seems like an act of gallantry: to worship confusion. To affirm that leftovers are not leftovers. It is like making little, monumental forests from garden waste and windfall. And giving it back its mystery. The true mystery is always unsettling, uncomfortable, and even embarrassing. But beneath that inescapable tremor, there is also a moment of rest, a kind of peace, an opening that no clarity could ever recreate. When we settle in that unsettling peace, that useless freedom, when we come to terms with it, we will realize that all beauty, all horror, all utopia, and all bonds between subjects and objects, were long ago and will once again be primordial disorder. It is about decapitating an idol and discovering it was always headless. When we abandon our geographic coordinates, there is no difference between bypassing the abyss and walking across it. And when the sun starts sinking in the uncertain line of the horizon, the curves, the elusive twists, and turns of these artificial natures, seem to flatten human order, seem to unmask the futility of memory and strip of their power all the binaries that grip human experience.”
Buggenhout’s work is in the collections of museums such as MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, The Roberts Institute of Art and the Saatchi Gallery in London, The Margulies Collection, and the Rubell Collection Family in Miami.
The solo exhibition will open to the public from the 7th of September to the 5th of November of this year.