How do you sell Bruegel to children? How can you make them look twice at his paintings? It’s like serving them broccoli. Give it to them straight and few will clean their plate. But they’re likely to spoon it up, if you mash it with a good story. A Finger in the Pie begins with a bombshell. In Bruegel’s painting The Peasant Wedding
a plate of pie goes missing from the large tray two men carry around. Nobody knows the perpetrator is a boy who can get into Bruegel’s works. His adventures bring the paintings back to life.
A Finger in the Pie
is a beautifully illustrated book with full-page pictures of some of Bruegel’s most famous paintings. Children are certain to look at those pictures more than once while reading. Why, they may even want to go to the museum to see the very paintings themselves.
Jan Brueghel was a prominent painter in his hometown of Antwerp, a good friend and frequent collaborator of Rubens. What is perhaps less well known is that Jan was also an exceptional draughtsman.
At the Snijders&Rockox House in Antwerp, some seventy works by Jan Brueghel have been brought together to create a unique exhibition. These drawings hail from collections held around the globe, including print rooms in Berlin, Paris, New York, Amsterdam, London and Stockholm, and is the first time they have all been on view together, presenting a significant cross-section of Jan Brueghel’s authentic drawn oeuvre. Jan Brueghel – A magnificent draughtsman has been created by the publishing firm BAI, in collaboration with the Snijders&Rockox House to celebrate this exhibition.
The book includes a biography, essays by Dr.Teréz Gerszi and Dr Wood Ruby on his draughtsmanship and six chapters in which the drawings are discussed according to their theme: sojourning in Italy, riverside and village scenes, study-sheets, roads and travellers, views of the sea and ports and coastal scenes, and impressions while travelling. The authors also place Brueghel’s draughtsmanship within the context of his complete works and the times in which he lived, in the process signalling relationships and making enlightening comparisons.
“To my mind, Koen is the photographer of the instant. Whatever the subject, the format, the colour may be, the emotion that is implied is always expressed vigorously; either with a sense of humour, seriousness, or with lots of tenderness. Unlike other photographers, he is not the prisoner of a style; his goal is to express the sincerity of the moment in its widest variety. Koen’s freedom also lies in a real physical need to be in motion, on a journey. In this way, systematically taking pictures beyond the borders allows him to focus, to find himself, and to come as close as possible to the essence of his soul.” Antoine Reyre, CEO CAPA Pictures
Shot in Time
is the first anthology by the Belgian photographer Koen Lauwaert, who displays his talent for developing an original and poetic language that alternates the different registers of contemporary photography, from portraiture to abstraction through reportage. Partly academically trained, studying at the Brussels Filmschool and the Photo Academy Rhok, Koen Lauwaert devised his own language in the field, working as a film operator during his military service and for an agency specialising in portraits of children and families as well as a cover author for rock band albums. Shot in Time is an autobiographical narrative in which the passion for photography goes hand in hand with Koen’s nomadic soul, the images are taken all over the world, notably in Italy, a country for which the author has a predilection.
Text in English and Italian.
Dreams, fears, projects, desires. Turning 18, with your future in front of you: it’s a special time, which the talented photographer, Anne-Catherine Chevalier, has tried to capture. Her sensitive lens is matched by the delicate writing of Geneviève Damas: the result is a selection of 50 exceptional portraits.
Text in English, French and Dutch.
Why did Hans Memling paint everything in such minute detail? How did Rubens, in just a few brushstrokes, create special effects that Steven Spielberg would envy? And why was the Southern Netherlands the artistic centre of the world for three centuries?
From Memling to Rubens: The Golden Age of Flanders
tells the story of Flemish art from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, as you’ve never read it before. It’s a rollercoaster ride through 300 years of cultural history. Leading the charge are breathtaking masterpieces from the collection of The Phoebus Foundation, unknown gems by the likes of Hans Memling, Quinten Metsys, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck that plunge you into a world full of folly and sin, fascination and ambition. Along the way you’ll bump into dukes and emperors, rich citizens and poor saints, picture galleries like wine cellars, and Antwerp as Hollywood on the Scheldt.
This is a stirring tale about the image and its meaning, and the link between culture and society. Above all, it’s about us, and about who we are today – as people.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition From Memling to Ruben – The Golden Age of Flanders,during Autumn 2020, in the Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn (Estonia).
Catrin Huber (*1968) works with architectural, fictional and imagined spaces as well as with site-responsive practices. Fascinated by ancient Roman wall painting, she developed site-specific installations in a topical dialogue with two Roman houses at the world-heritage sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii. This intricately designed book presents Huber’s versatile spatial interventions, discusses the complex relation between her installations and their respective archaeological settings (local/temporal), and re-evaluates the daring concept of a historiographic turn within the arts.
Text in English, German and Italian.
Jan-Ole Schiemann (*1983) belongs to a young artist generation, subjecting painting to a critical actualisation. On the fringes of figuration and abstraction, he extracts fragments of advertisement, comics, and architecture from their original context. Almost transparently, he interweaves and layers structures, logos, topographies, graffiti, and everyday textures. This complex surface mesh, always full frontal, yet equally deep, dissolves the fabric of reality as a flashing, constantly renewed and self-generating hyper-text, into which one can actively immerse oneself or trace the origins of individual elements.
Defying traditional portraiture, Wolfgang Strassl (*1956) has made a series of photographs which encapsulates the rich, varied, eclectic and diverse population of London as seen in the democratising space of a carriage on the London Underground. By omitting the face in these portraits, Strassl allows us an undistracted and genuine perusal of these passengers and the stories, which their visual appearances are telling. This also challenges our ability to see, recognise and understand these stories. It is a gentle yet pervasive look at the great sea of humanity travelling in subterranean London and the rich diversity in this contemporary metropolis.
Text in English and German.
Leon Keer is the master of optical illusion. The ‘Dutch JR’ plays with perspectives and creates a whole new world. One in which Snow White is stuck under a door. Or a world in which you unexpectedly enter a seventies living room. This is his first monograph. He allows the reader an exclusive look into his world and imagination. How does he work? And how does a wild idea develop into a gigantic 3D artwork?
This body of work is a contemplation of human beings’ passage on earth and their intimate interrelation with the environment. This book attempts to bring humour to the things we are getting attached to. It points at the invisible within the visible, the immaterial within the material or the vertical nature of being (and its mirror-like quality) within our horizontal way of living (where our mind, time, and space condition our experiences). The naked body is seen as our primary indivisible unit of perception which is usually pushed and pulled by our thinking mind’s desire to either get less or more. In other words, our lives are coloured by our minds and since body-mind is a single entity, most of the colours painted on the body are an allusion to the range of our changing desires from being invisible or transparent to wanting to be singular and the centre of attention. The book’s Interviews (the interviewers are from Russia, Colombia, Korea, Germany, and the US) stanzas, and photographs are not seen as being subservient to one another but can be seen as an assemblage of three independent directions that may or may not intersect following each reader.
It’s 1939 and Hitler just invaded Poland. Henry is 13 years old, and unbeknownst to him or his family, his life is about to change forever. Soon he is torn from his siblings and parents and finds himself packed into a covered truck with dozens of desperate strangers. He doesn’t have any idea where he’s going or when he’ll be let out, if ever. Henry is now struggling for his life in one of the most diabolical and murderous events in human history – the Nazi plan to exterminate every last Jew in Europe.
Travel with him to a munition’s factory in his home town of Radom, where he is forced to labour 12 hours a day with barely enough rations to keep him alive. Discover how he manages to obtain extra food through ingenuity and a willingness to risk his life. Would we have the courage to do the same? Follow Henry to an airstrip in Unterriexingen where he is put to work in the freezing cold with barely any clothes and no shoes to protect him from the elements. Learn how, during an Allied air strike, he escapes to a nearby farmhouse where he pleads with the owner to take him in after he’s caught eating with the swine. Feel what it’s like to hold a Luger for the first time while Henry struggles with the idea of killing the Nazi officer who allows him to clean his pistol and shine his boots, when he is not forced to work building what would someday become his own prison. Would you pull the trigger? Walk with Henry on a ‘death march’ through the streets of Germany with no end in sight, having to endure the taunts of passersby who yell nasty epithets and throw stones at him while he reaches for a discarded apple core and is stabbed in the back by a Nazi soldier’s bayonet. How many of us would have the strength to continue in such circumstances?
This true-to-life story shines as a beacon of hope and perseverance and serves as a backdrop-narrative to remind us that racism and hate can lead to murderous behaviour and the rapid destruction of civil society. Every Last Jew
is a beautifully written memoir by Henry’s son Mark Koperweis that will take you on a journey that is up-close, personal, and in full living horror. When you emerge, you will never again see the world or your life in the same way. It will change you, as it did Henry, forever.
The rise of several divisive leaders within contemporary politics, has once again brought action to the foreground. As a new generation makes their voices heard, they are also grappling to find effective platforms for action through design. The notion of action simultaneously evokes a discussion on what we are acting for and value. This is particularly important to consider at a moment when the authoritative systems – Governments and corporations – appear more divergent to the voices on the ground. At the same time, within an increasingly pluralistic society, what we collectively value is increasingly unclear, which presents a primary challenge on action. Bracket [Takes Action]
is situated at a critical point in history where the who, what, where, and how of action need to be re-conceptualised to relate to who we are, how we live, and how we communicate today. The role of design and the agency of the designer are at stake in facilitating or stifling action.
This book presents over 28 essays and 15 design projects that are structured into 6 sub-themes: ReAction, CounterAction, InterAction, FAction, InAction, and RetroAction. The intent of Bracket is to unpack the contemporary possibility of action through design.