Layered Realities is a group exhibition featuring work by Peter Buggenhout, Sadaharu Horio, Mario Schifano, and Angel Vergara. Taking Mare (1963) by the Italian post-modern pop artist Schifano as a starting point, the exhibition forms an investigation into how artists meticulously construct their personal universe, built up out of blended layers of their personal experience and the outside world. Along the way, it poses questions about the position of art within society, scratching but the surface of our interpretations and imagination.

"La peinture, c'est la vie qui s'échange." - Angel Vergara

This work by Angel Vergara is part of a series that was made for his solo exhibition at MACS Grand-Hornu in 2023 titles Dans l'instant. Conceptually, it is a continuation of a project he started in 2020 during the preparation of Manifesta 13 in Marseille. Here, Vergara worked with a group of visually impaired children. Together with them, he created paintings and drawings that became the canvases for different performances in the streets of Marseille and the painting series Les Belles Idées Reçues. While the participatory element has always been present in his oeuvre, concrete workshops and collaborations would once again be a crucial component in the creation of this solo exhibition at MACS Grand-Hornu, this time with visually impaired children from Mons.

Painting is often considered a static art form. A completed canvas with dry paint departs an artist's creative studio to be seen by the public. For Angel Vergara, the opposite is true. To paint is to act. It's not a passive practice, it's an active one. Throughout his long oeuvre, painting has been a form of constant interaction with visible and invisible forces. By bringing his canvases into the world-out of the studio's confined, safe walls-he allows them to absorb the environment, continuously changing throughout.

With the exhibition To Breathe - Archive of Prototype, Kimsooja revisits two central interventions from her oeuvre: her stained-glass window in Metz Cathedral, and her 14m steel sculpture in the form of a needle, realised for Cornell University and on display today in YSP. In their own way, both installations engage with air and light, with our perspective on the universe, with our memory, and with traditional and scientific industries such as glass-blowing and nanotechnology.

The central space of the Patio Gallery is filled with the glow of the colour spectrum of 15 stained-glass windows. Kimsooja created these works following her intervention in the south transept of Metz Cathedral, 2022, in collaboration with glassblower Pierre Parot. Like a dimensional painting created by nature, without brush and paint, this intervention builds on central notions in Kimsooja's oeuvre: performance through 'non-doing', a statement through 'non-invention', thus exploring concepts such as materiality and immateriality, mobility and immobility. The visitor is invited to get in the middle of the reflections and diffuse transparencies, becoming a participant rather than a spectator: an abstract light landscape unfolds with every walk through the installation.

This exhibition is the fifth in collaboration with Axel Vervoordt Gallery, and celebrates Kimsooja's solo exhibitions at De Lakenhal and Bourse de Commerce, and her installation at the exhibition 'Window on Infinity' by Jef Verheyen at KMSKA.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery was founded in January 2011 by Boris Vervoordt. As a strong supporter of the ZERO and Gutai art movements from its inception, Axel Vervoordt Gallery’s vision has gradually evolved into contemporary art with a special interest in the concept of the void, space and time. They focus on art that puts the creative process first and provide a neutral platform for artists with whom they’ve created a valuable and intense relationship. In 2014 they expanded to Hong Kong, to further bridge artistic expressions between the East and the West.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery will be open from 11:00 until 18:00 every day.