Une Histoire Naturelle (catalogue), 2011
Luuk Wilmering - Une Histoire Naturelle
The Institut Néerlandais presented, for the first time in France, an important retrospective showing of the work of the Dutch artist Luuk Wilmering. In the exhibition Une Histoire naturelle – a title inspired by his many visits to the Musée Nationale d‘Histoire Naturelle during his stay in Paris – the public is offered a survey of Luuk Wilmering‘s output from the last twelve years, including A Personal Geographic, Visiting Versaille, Cut Out and his most recent work, Bird Needs Shelter. Wilmering worked on this last series over a period of one year in the Holsboer studio in the Cité des Arts in Paris.
Wilmering‘s oeuvre comprises installations, collages, photography, drawings and paintings. He also produces numerous artist‘s books. In his work, Luuk Wilmering continually investigates, not without humour, his own identity and his position as person and as artist. The mirror-effect between the artist and his public is an important element in his work. In his collages, he takes his images out of context in the same way as he repeatedly takes himself as artist out of the context of general artistic practice.
A number of his large photographs will be on view, photographs in which Wilmering himself is always the central figure. These self-portraits show the artist in everyday situations that, through their very banality, acquire an absurd, comic and sometimes sour quality. Photographic works like True Believer (2001) or The man who never experienced anything (2009)—the latter being also the title of an artist‘s book Luuk Wilmering published in 2010—are easily recognizable works that without posing direct questions still set the viewer thinking about his own everyday reality.
These everyday goings-on in the world are an important source of inspiration for Luuk Wilmering. His photography, his various collage series, paintings, installations,
multiples and books are all born of his feeling that reality consists of ―pretty aimless chains of coincidences and absurd situations, in which it‘s easy to lose your way.‖ His works are often constructed from pseudo-events—stories that run parallel to the reality in which Wilmering has made sudden shifts and enlargements.
(quotation Institut Neerlandais)
