Super Conceptual Pop at Fondation CAB

If nowadays you are about to curate or set up an exhibition, most probably you are going to ask ChatGPT to find the perfect title for it. No need to waste time into finetuning your prompts because Stefan Brüggemann has got you covered, with his iconoclastic and irreverent work “Show Titles”. It is long list of exhibition titles offered freely for everyone’s use by the artist.

“Post-invisible,” “Why didn’t you make it larger?”, “Already made”, “Art at the age of extinction”, “When I shit I look at Andy Warhol’s books”, and so on. Where do you think Marjolaine Lévy, the curator, found the title for this exhibition at Fondation CAB? Super Conceptual Pop is indeed one of the many titles provided by Brüggemann, juxtaposing two artistic currents that are, in some ways, poles apart. Conceptual art, aiming to strip art from its visuality and spectacularisation to focus on language, concepts and words. On the contrary, Pop Art was the epitome of the society of the spectacle, taking inspiration from movie icons, comics and advertisement and transforming those images into symbols, becoming at a certain point “the spectacle within the spectacle” especially with Andy Warhol who in turn became an icon.

So, how can these two worlds coexist? At the entrance you might find an answer with François Curlet’s neon installation Western which reads Spaghetti Conceptual Art, there you have it, a reflection on language and the evocation of an imaginary that is unquestionably pop, Italian Spaghetti Western.

The beauty of this combination lies in its unpredictability, a sort of “plot twist” that shuffles the cards of contemporary creation. Like Delphine Coindet, who works along that thin line between virtual and real, leaning more towards the symbolic rather than the mimetic value of her works, like for the Fountain or the Tree. Or Elsa Werth and her Blind Smile where something common like a smile is magnified to a monumental size using bicycle chains and cables hung on a yellow wall, a joyful gesture that thanks also to its repetition reveals an eerie trait. A special mention to the work Untitled (Beste P., bis) by the late Walter Swennen, depicting a banana peel less glamorous and a bit melancholic than the infamous Warholian one.

Fondation CAB has also an artist residency program and on September 27^th Franco-Japanese artist Mina Enowaki will be showcasing her final bronze sculptures during her last open studio. Enowaki works across many media such as painting, drawing, photography and sculpture, of course. Her sculptures have an organic quality infused with a vital sap which come from her interest for certain animist beliefs from Japanese folklore and natural remnants of mineral, vegetal, and animal origin. To approach her work, a suggestion from a short story by Virginia Woolf might be fitting:

“That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it, to enjoy this bliss instead of a life of cold and wet upon the high road.”

Until 30.10.2025
Wednesday to Saturday
From 12 to 6 pm