Peter Downsbrough: The Dice are Thrown

Thursday, 06.03.2008 Friday 07.03.2008

In presence of Peter Downsbrough, Eva Gonzalez-Sancho and Philippe Pirotte.

Peter Downsbrough (*1940 in New York City, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium) is known in the artworld as a concept artist and one of the great reformers since the 1960ties. His multifarious oeuvre consists of sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, film and video.

His line of thinking about the description of space, based on notions of situation and context, is applied to constructed space as well as to language. Film thereby video display another of the aspects of space: time.

Peter Downsbrough’s work is not so much known through his films but rather through the room or wall pieces he realizes with black tape and letters, the map pieces, the books, the maquettes. Twenty-one films and videos have been realized between 1976 and 2007, the period between 2002 and now being particularly productive (14 videos). There was a seventeen-year gap between Now With, in Three Parts (1983) and the film Occupied, 2000, which is quite known together with the subsequent videos, all black and white and rather short, in which one travels from one city to another, from one architecture to another site; often exploring spaces through long travelling shots punctuated by freeze frames that are both abrupt and precise; places intermittently occupied by words – sometimes clearly enunciated, others inserted in the very image; sites are usually accompanied by a background sound.

Eva Gonzalez-Sancho curated the film programm of Peter Downsbrough for a presentation at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in September 2007 as well as his solo exhibition at the Burgundy FRAC, Dijon in fall 2004. Since 2004 she is the director of the Burgundy FRAC, Dijon, France.

Philippe Pirotte is art historian and curator and the director of Kunsthalle Bern since 2005.

Peter Downsbrough: The Dice are Thrown
Retrospective of films
Kuratoren: Eva Gonzalez-Sancho, Philippe Pirotte