This March, the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens will hold two solo exhibitions featuring artists who have never exhibited solo in Belgium before. Acclaimed British artist Gary Hume will showcase a new series of paintings in “Destroyed School Paintings,” while New Zealand-born artist Francis Upritchard will bring her enigmatic figurative sculptures to “Big Fish Eat Little Fish.”
For two years, Hume collected photos from newspapers and magazines that showed destroyed classrooms from war zones in the Middle East. Children’s drawings that remained in the rooms were used as the basis of Hume’s Destroyed School Painting series. As a response to the sensational images of war violence, Humen’s works reveal human life’s vulnerability and explore the boundaries between empathy, memory, beauty and violence. The paintings are exhibited alongside anthropomorphic sculptures based on Hume’s Wonky Wheels.
