Didier Vermeiren


Didier Vermeiren is a Belgian sculptor.
His first works, in the 1970s, stood at the crossroads of conceptual art, minimal art and the tradition of modern sculpture. Afterwards, the photographical documentation of his own work became more and more significant, until it became an entire aspect of it, photographs and sculptures responding to each other and generating new works all the while.
Didier Vermeiren lives and work in Paris and Brussels. He has been teaching since 2002 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany and since 1991 at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. He is a member of the board of the Musée Rodin.

Work

In the late 1970s, he turned his attention to the question, essential in the history of modern sculpture, of the plinth, or base,. creating the « plinth sculptures » through which he was introduced to the international art scene, starting with a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, titled An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.
Traditionally, the base was not considered to be part of the sculpture, but served to transport the sculpted figure from the "real" space into the artistic or monumental space. The function of the plinth as pedestal then gradually disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Whereas certain artists, like Brancusi, turned the plinth into an integral part of their work by incorporating it into the sculpture, others no longer wanted the sculpted object to be separated from the ground by this presentational element and chose to place the sculpture directly on the floor, on the same level as the spectator. Modernism, in other words, made the plinth useless. Taking this development seriously, but wanting to think it through more rigorously, Vermeiren reevaluated the purpose of the plinth and turned it into an autonomous volume in the space: if the plinth is a base or a foundation, it can be displayed for its own sake and on its own merits, taking on the fate of a work of art. All that is left is the pure presence on the ground and its many sculptural possibilities. This gave rise to an ongoing dialogue with space. Situating works in the space and reconfiguring the space in relation to these works became the purpose of every exhibition. For Vermeiren, space is not empty, but plastic, which is why he thinks of his works as hollowing it out and sculpting it.
Sculpture's incorporation of the space — the entire space, including the firmament — constitutes one of the characteristic features of twentieth-century sculpture. Carl Andre, in dialogue with Brancusi's Endless Column, once stated that his sculptures, as horizontal, flat and low-lying as they are, nevertheless support "a column of air" on their entire surface area. This column can be pictured as extending "endlessly" above the works, or as bounded by the vault of heaven or that of a building.
Beginning in the seventies, Vermeiren set out to explore this incorporation of space and the sculptural demarcation of pure presence on the ground. We might think here of his works consisting of an object made of solid and heavy material placed on an object of identical size but made of soft and light material, with one crushing the other in a demonstration of the weight of the work in every sculptural project. Then, in a direct confrontation with the problem of the plinth — which is also the problem of tradition — Vermeiren began to exhibit « replicas » of plinths of sculptures by Rodin, Carpeaux, Chamberlain..., usually made from the same material as the figures their originals supported in the museum. It was no longer space in general that was incorporated into the work, but the space of tradition — in a gesture of memory.
The plinth for Vermeiren is thus not simply a "ready-made" or a found object, but rather brings into play the very origin of the work of art. In a truly plastic process, the artist reconfigures, reworks and "sculpts" the chosen volume using traditional techniques in order to accomplish the incorporation of space and presence into the work. To this end, a "plinth" can be posed in reverse on another one identical to it, or on its negative, or even turned inside out like a glove with the armature on the outside.
Thus, if Vermeiren's sculptures often make references to other sculptures that belong to the history of his art, this approach only becomes meaningful to the extent that his pieces also refer back and forth to each other within his own body of work. A sculpture is always like a term in a sequence and forms a response to earlier works. In this sense, Vermeiren's work is also always a remembering of his work. Each of the artist's exhibition looks both backward and forward

Collections

Vermeiren's works are part of several major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New-York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Chicago, the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht.

Exhibitions