Michael Borremans Hallucination and Reality

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  • Special Exhibition
Sunday, May 22–Sunday, September 4, 2005
Michael Borremans Hallucination and Reality

The Journey (True Colours, detail), 2002. Michaël Borremans (Belgian, b. 1963). Pencil, watercolor, white and black ink, varnish on book cover; 17 x 24.7 cm. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery

About The Exhibition

Organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, this was Belgian artist Michaël Borremans's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Comprising 63 works created since 1995, this exhibition focused on Borremans's small drawings and paintings on cardboard.

A rich amalgamation of oddly formal personages participating in mysterious, perhaps secret activities, Borremans's images were cinematic in their reference and intimate in scale. Often annotated at their edges with technical notations, wry musings, and construction details, many of Borremans's drawings were proposals for public monuments that collapse architectural platforms, emotion and sentiment, and complex postwar political ideologies into clever ruminations on the human condition.

Borremans's work—both satiric and sincere—commented humorously on middle-class restraint and the position of the artist in contemporary society.

Other venues: Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst (October 16, 2004–January 9, 2005); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (February 5–April 17, 2005).

Organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent. Promotional support provided by angle magazine. The Cleveland Museum of Art received operating support from the Ohio Arts Council.