Atelier Van Lieshout Lust for Life

Featuring an ensemble of lamps from his ongoing bodies of works, the exhibition intends to reveal the interplay between utopia and destruction. While sculptures like Scarlett Lamp, Dancing Lamp, and Venus Lamp (2017) reflect on the course of life, one of the van Lieshout ‘s recurring theme; Domestikator Lamp (2017), never exhibited before, refers to domestication. The process of how humans want to improve and control the world with ingenuity, creativity, sophistication, technology and persistence. It started with agriculture, followed by the industrial revolution, and now new technologies, like artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, robotics, and industrial farming. Van Lieshout look at how we push our ethical borders without any real understanding of the long term effects.

In addition to these sculptural lamps, some are more conceptual and part of a larger group called the End Of Everything. 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 such as Hydroform Lamp, Long gaztank Lamp, and Hydroform Prepared Lamp (2016). Gas tanks and heavy steel tubes were pitted against the power of hydraulic equipment, drop hammers, and other self-built machines. These functional sculpture are not the result of a careful design process but are the products of a battle that the artist stages between the human, the machine, and material against the objects, concept, and process that leads the artist to a totally new way of designing products.

This tainted optimism, the urge to destroy and to renew, the interplay between the dystopian and the utopian is what defines van Lieshout’s work. For three decades, Atelier van Lieshout has produced work that breaks the boundaries of art, design, and architecture.