Atelier Van Lieshout Furnification

Carpenters Workshop Gallery is proud to present Furnification, a solo exhibition by Joep van Lieshout. Furnification features the results of van Lieshout’s recent sculptural experiments to invent a new material vocabulary. The exhibited sculptures are part of a series that the artist refers to as CryptoFururism in which he revisits the Italian Futurists a century later to look at resonances with emerging Fascist tendencies today. Van Lieshout uses his art to reveal the interplay between Utopia and destruction. With CryptoFuturism, van Lieshout sets out to destroy in order to renew and start again, to hit the reset button. Van Lieshout’s fascination with man and machine, environment and consumption, society and systems have driven him to built a group of raw, industrial artworks – hammers, presses, shredders and rollers - that can be interpreted as machines for either construction or destruction, as a negative or positive force, as a break from tradition, and a change for the future. Their primary goal is to recycle, be it scrap, consumer goods, artworks even, to create new works of art and a new sculptural language. The machines are, however, also sculptures in their own right.