The Jewish Museum of Belgium is pleased to present a new exhibition devoted to the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). The exhibition is organized by Barbara Cuglietta and Stephanie Manasseh in collaboration with the artist’s family.
Through a unique selection of Wall Drawings, works on paper, gouaches, structures and archives dating from the 1960s to the 2000s, this exhibition aims to highlight the diversity and unity in Sol LeWitt’s prolific work. It will feature a double “premiere”: an exploration of his Jewish heritage and an investigation of his links with Belgium. It will also be accompanied by the launch of the new Sol LeWitt app created by Microsoft.

Exhibition

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, into a Jewish immigrant family from Russia, Solomon (Sol) LeWitt is one of the pioneers of conceptual and minimal art, best known for his Wall Drawings. Although he is not religious, leading a secularized life, Sol LeWitt has maintained discreet but tenacious links with his Jewish heritage throughout his life. In the 1990s, he became actively involved in his community in Chester, Connecticut, designing the new synagogue for the Reform Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, which was inaugurated in 2001. For Sol LeWitt, designing a synagogue was “a problem of geometric forms in a space that conforms to ritual usage”. With the help of archives, drawings, photographs and testimonials, the exhibition explores the genesis of this major project, which has remained little known to the public until now.

The exhibition also addresses another forgotten aspect of Sol LeWitt’s career: the close relationships he developed throughout his career with collectors, gallery owners and artists based in Belgium. Visitors will be able to discover Wall Drawing #138, first shown in Brussels at the MTL gallery – which played a pioneering role in introducing conceptual art to Belgium – as well as Sol LeWitt’s collaboration with architect Charles Vandenhove on the design of the University Hospital in Liège.

All the works shown in the exhibition come from Belgian public and private collections, as well as from the LeWitt Collection. As for the realization of the Wall Drawings, directly on the walls of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, it is the occasion of an exceptional participative experience, bringing together alongside professional draftsmen from the LeWitt studio young artists and art students based in Brussels. For each mural, teams are formed around a professional assistant who accompanies and guides the apprentices. This educational initiative is a unique opportunity for the latter to be involved in the creative process of one of the greatest American artists.

Finally, the exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Belgium is the occasion for the European launch of a smartphone application dedicated to the artist and his work, developed by Microsoft with the LeWitt Collection. True to Sol LeWitt’s desire to make art accessible to all, this app will offer visitors an immersive and educational experience unlike any other.

Wall Drawing #528G, 1987, india ink and color ink wash. Installation view at the Jewish Museum of Belgium (c) Private Collection, Belgium / Picture: Hugard & Vanoverschelde

Born in Brussels in 1950, Julien Friedler is the son of Jewish parents from Transylvania (now Romania). His work is deeply atypical, designed to move and be transformed. 

The cycle of paintings on paper presented in this exhibition takes us on an intimate journey, in the form of free associations, which Julien Friedler renders in a powerful, suggestive, archetypal work. The work is an introspective daydream, an imaginary transcription of an ambiguous reality that moves from wonder to disenchantment, from radiance to the disquieting expression of the dark forces that inhabit it. The evocations born of this quasi-hypnotic plunge into the unconscious world are revealed through gesture and color, to be inscribed in an almost automatic writing, like an instinctive trace, on paper.

Why do you stand at the door? is the result of research carried out in 2021 and 2022 by Ukrainian artist Nikolay Karabinovych (°1988, Odesa*) at the Jewish Museum of Belgium. In “Project Space”, video, sound, text and installation by this multidisciplinary artist are placed in dialogue with publications from the 1920s-1930s preserved in the museum’s Yiddish library, as well as with objects from Jewish heritage.

The title of the exhibition Why do you stand at the door? is taken from the popular Yiddish song “Lomir Zikh Iberbetn” (Let’s reconcile). The lyrics are a call for reconciliation in love, as much as a reference to the fear of the other’s leaving. The verse is used here as a metaphor for the migration of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, a forced nomadism also found in the Yiddish books of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. These books provide a starting point for the poetic exploration of a forgotten collective memory. Particular attention will be paid to the testimonies of Yiddish women and authors of the interwar period, whose books shed light on a history of migration sidelined by national narratives and myths.

Working in partnership with curator Patricia Couvet (°1994, Paris), Nikolay Karabinovych seeks to bring together objects and archival documents with sources that are not referenced by institutions, with a view to valorizing what is not perceptible and unearthing invisible narratives. This approach enables us to rewrite a collective history, at a time when one of the foundations of that history – Yiddish, the quintessential diasporic language – seems to be disappearing. It also provides a framework for understanding the personal experiences of forced migration, past and present. It reminds us that, in every era, the artist is a witness to his own time: a critical source of historiography, he makes visible the cracks in a history that we cannot ignore as it unfolds every day in Kyiv, Odesa, Bucha, Kharkiv and Mariupol.

*Most Ukrainian city names have historically been translated from Russian into other languages. In this text and in the exhibition, we have taken the decolonial approach of keeping the names of the towns in Ukrainian.

© Isabelle Arthuis

Het Joods Museum van België presenteert een nieuwe tentoonstelling gewijd aan de Amerikaanse conceptuele kunstenaar Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). De tentoonstelling wordt georganiseerd door Barbara Cuglietta en Stephanie Manasseh in samenwerking met de nalatenschap van de kunstenaar. 

Aan de hand van een unieke selectie van Wall Drawings (muurtekeningen), werken op papier, gouaches, structuren en archiefmateriaal uit de jaren 1960 tot 2000, belicht deze tentoonstelling de diversiteit en eenheid in Sol LeWitts productieve oeuvre. Het wordt een dubbele première: een verkenning van zijn Joodse roots en een onderzoek naar zijn banden met België. De tentoonstelling gaat ook gepaard met de lancering van de nieuwe Sol LeWitt-applicatie, ontwikkeld door Microsoft.

De tentoonstelling

Solomon (Sol) LeWitt, geboren in Hartford, Connecticut, in een familie van Joodse immigranten uit Rusland, was een pionier op het gebied van conceptuele en minimalistische kunst, en staat vooral bekend om zijn Wall Drawings. Hoewel hij niet religieus was en een seculier leven leidde, onderhield Sol LeWitt gedurende zijn hele leven een discrete maar hardnekkige band met zijn Joodse achtergrond. In de jaren negentig raakte hij actiever betrokken bij zijn gemeenschap in Chester, Connecticut, en ontwierp hij de nieuwe synagoge van de gereformeerde Congregatie Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, die in 2001 werd geopend. Voor Sol LeWitt was het ontwerp van een synagoge “een probleem van geometrische vormen in een ruimte die aangepast is aan ritueel gebruik”. Aan de hand van archieven, tekeningen, foto’s en getuigenissen verkent de tentoonstelling in het Joods Museum van België de ontstaansgeschiedenis van dit belangrijke project, dat tot nu toe weinig bekend is bij het grote publiek.

De tentoonstelling gaat ook in op een ander vergeten aspect van Sol LeWitts carrière: de nauwe relaties die de kunstenaar doorheen zijn carrière ontwikkelde met Belgische verzamelaars, galeriehouders en in België gevestigde kunstenaars. Zo zal onder meer Wall Drawing #138, voor het eerst gemaakt in Brussel in de galerie MTL – die een pioniersrol speelde bij de introductie van conceptuele kunst in België – worden getoond, evenals Sol LeWitts samenwerking met de architect Charles Vandenhove bij het ontwerp van het Universitair Ziekenhuis in Luik.

Alle werken in de tentoonstelling zijn afkomstig uit Belgische openbare en privé-collecties, alsook uit de LeWitt Collection. De Wall Drawings, die rechtstreeks op de muren van het Joods Museum van België worden aangebracht, vormen een uitzonderlijke participatieve ervaring, waarbij in Brussel gevestigde jonge kunstenaars en studenten aan kunstscholen worden samengebracht met professionele kunstenaars uit de studio van LeWitt. Voor elke muurtekening worden teams gevormd rond een professionele assistent die met de lokale studenten werkt en hen begeleidt. Dit educatieve initiatief is voor hen een unieke kans om betrokken te worden bij het creatieve proces van een van de grootste Amerikaanse kunstenaars.

Ten slotte is de tentoonstelling in het Joods Museum van België de gelegenheid om in Europa een applicatie voor smartphones te lanceren, gewijd aan de kunstenaar en zijn werk en ontwikkeld door Microsoft in samenwerking met de LeWitt Collection. In overeenstemming met de wens van Sol LeWitt om kunst voor iedereen toegankelijk te maken, zal deze applicatie de bezoekers een unieke meeslepende en educatieve ervaring bieden.

(Omslagfoto: Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #528G, 1987. Exhibition view at Galleria Massimo Minini, Italy, 2013. Photo Courtesy Galleria Massimo Minini © Estate of Sol LeWitt, 2021)

“A collection is a state of mind.” Galila Barzilai Hollander

“Works on Paper” offers an incursion into the teeming universe of Galila Barzilai Hollander, a Belgian collector born in Tel Aviv. For the past fifteen years, this extraordinary personality has been assembling works of contemporary art into a collection that tells the story of her own life: underpinning the works brought together is a compelling desire to reinvent the self.

The exhibition offers a clear cut through this plethoric universe, presenting a selection of works on paper. Visitors discover how international artists (Jonathan Callan, Jae Ko, Anish Kapoor, William Klein, Angela Glajcar, Andrea Wolfensberger, Brian Dettmer, Haegue Yang and others) reinvent this everyday, commonplace material into unexpectedly powerful art objects. Collages, sculptures, inscriptions, installations and jewelry are all on display, reminiscent of the collector’s ex-centric personality, but also offering a reflection on the art of diversion. Here, work on paper becomes a realm of detour, where each work plays with our perception as much as our judgments.

© Jonathan Callan, Art around Mythology around Global Strategy, 2014

From October 15, 2021 to March 31, 2022, the Jewish Museum of Belgium presents its new educational project “Caricatured Imagery of Jews throughout History. Outline of an unusual collection”.

Through an overview of the extraordinary collection assembled by Arthur Langerman, an Antwerp-born Belgian born in the middle of the war, it offers a glimpse into the collective madness represented by visual anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that is tracked here across continents and centuries. From pagan and religious anti-Judaism to social and political anti-Semitism, this didactic project presents an original and striking look at the representation of Jews, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and the stereotypes attached to them.

The presentation of multiplex-printed facsimiles includes paintings, engravings, wooden statuettes, photographs, archives, posters and postcards, as well as unusual objects such as beer mugs, kennels, enamel plates, ashtrays and matchboxes. While offering images from all origins, the designers have chosen to focus particularly on “Belgian” illustrations: from the alleged desecration of the hosts in Brussels (1370) to the textile vignettes made by some of the actors at the Aalst Carnival, Belgium is not to be outdone.

The panels are accompanied by objects and archives from the collections of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. A video module, dedicated to the collector Arthur Langerman, reveals his personal story, shedding light on his atypical career and his motivation, driven by the duty of remembrance.

The Jewish Museum of Belgium presents this project as part of its Educational Service, accredited by the “Democracy or Barbarism” department of the Wallonia-Brussels federation. À travers des visites guidées, le service éducatif propose d’interroger l’utilisation de stéréotypes, hier et comme aujourd’hui. Our “Let’s meet a Jew” workshops, in particular the “Myths and Stereotypes” activity, will be offered in conjunction with this educational exhibition, as will the possibility of organizing a meeting with a witness to the Holocaust.

The exhibition

Combining photographs, videos and manuscripts, the exhibition places at its heart a space-time as precise as it is emblematic: the island of Lesbos in the year 2020. Situated in the Aegean Sea, a few kilometers off the Turkish coast, this island experienced a succession of crises in 2020, making it a nodal point in our history and consciousness. It is in this context that the Jewish Museum of Belgium has conceived this exhibition, an original creation that explores themes that reflect the long history of Jewish communities: exile, violence and solidarity.

Shown here for the first time, Mathieu Pernot’s work on Lesbos in 2020 is part of a long-term project. For over ten years, the photographer has been tackling the issue of migration and the presence of asylum seekers on the European continent. While the first images reflected the invisibility of these individuals, hidden under sheets in the streets of Paris or chased out of the forest of Calais, the series produced subsequently explore new forms of shared narratives. By collecting texts written in school notebooks or receiving images recorded on their cell phones, the author also acts as a conduit for “other people’s lives”, showing how this life, even before being that of others, is a shared History that must be told together.

Winner of the Prix Cartier-Bresson 2019, Pernot follows the approach of documentary photography, ultimately subverting its protocols. Questioning his own practice, exploring alternative formulas, his work builds what is so often missing: narratives with several voices.

Publication

Published by GwinZegal and produced as part of the “Something is Happening” exhibition organized by the Jewish Museum of Belgium, “Something is Happening. Lesbos 2020” is on sale at our museum reception desk.

Coming off the press in May 2021, this book immerses us in Mathieu Pernot’s photographic work with migrants in the Moria camp. In this pictorial narrative, the winner of the 2019 Cartier-Bresson prize takes us, chapter by chapter, “On the path”, “Crossing the footbridge”, “Building a shelter”, “Making a fire”, “Waiting”. The book shifts gears, showing us “What happens” when everything is suddenly destroyed by an act of despair reminiscent of classical tragedy, and all that’s left is to “Save what can be saved” and “Start all over again”.