Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft

We are pleased to announce a conversation with Laurent Dupont, on the occasion of his solo exhibition The Creature, taking place at Kunstverein Nürnberg on Tuesday, July 27, 2021, 7 pm.

Laurent Dupont’s exhibition The Creature features a body of paintings specifically produced for Kunstverein Nürnberg. These recent works originate from a proposal made to Chiara Cossu, Sien Custers, Arwen Herygers, Femke Ooms, Kyra Rogiers, Judith Schotte, Eillen Sels, Evien Van Rijt, Tibo Vergote, and Hannah Willems, all of whom are currently studying at the painting department of Sint Lucas in Antwerp, Belgium. 

In March 2021 they were invited to reproduce a painting from a description of an existing work while not having visual access to it. Laurent Dupont and his colleagues Anne Daems and Ellen De Meutter wrote a descriptive template for the reproduction of a painting made by Sara Deraedt in 2014, itself an appropriation of a small b/w-reproduction of a work, later found to be attributable to the French Surrealist Felix Labisse (1905-1982).

Taking on the task to transfigure the text into painting, the resulting interpretations were confronted with Deraedt’s work afterwards, which was brought to the school for a discussion, subsequently to be displayed together for a one-day exhibition in the studio.

In a separate procedure, following Kunstverein Nürnberg’s invitation, Laurent Dupont has asked the workshop’s participants and Deraedt for their permission to adapt these eleven works, effectively copying them after photos he had previously made. Utilizing existing, readily available canvases for the task, each motif – previously oriented on the size of Deraedt’s work – consequently had to be upscaled by a factor of four. By using a projector, Dupont constructed each painting in one sitting, reproducing merely its surface. Each of the work’s titles indicate the previous author the motif originates from, it’s original size, as well as the accompanying title given by its interpreter.

Past series by Laurent Dupont include everyday objects painted monochrome, card board boxes – their printed surface colors meticulously covered – or selections of copied, anonymous animal paintings, each reproduced and (re-)sized relative to the animals represented. These operational and procedural tasks, often with subtle shifts, or for the lack of a better word, „ideas“, are stand-ins, that serve as a cause for painting as a practice. Though these operations could be assumed to stand in close proximity to appropriation, this categorization would not entirely do the work justice. His practice revolves in cycles that seem to repeat, continuously reworking its own narrow margins.

Laurent Dupont was born 1976 in Liège (BE). He lives and works in Brussels.