Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven: AMVK

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) is a singulary complex artist. She was born in 1951 in Antwerp, where she still lives and works.

Since the 1970s, she has been active as visual artist, graphic designer and performer. She has always been a pioneer—a female, collaborative, cerebral forerunner in a male-dominated, sales-oriented, visibility-crazed art world—and should therefore be considered an artist for the future.

AMVK’s practice is truly interdisciplinary. Her first medium was drawing. She has been working with pioneering scientists for more than 40 years. In 1981, she founded the noise band Club Moral, together with artist Danny Devos. Under the same title, the pair organised events in Antwerp until 1993 and published the magazine Force Mental from 1982.

In addition to these collaborations, self-organisation and self-analysis are fundamental aspects of AMVK’s oeuvre. Her creative involvement in artificial intelligence and other manifestations of the mystic cannot be separated from her social thought, societal engagement and general inquisitiveness.

AMVK’s works are constellations of visual language and text. To make them, she uses the materials, tools and tricks of commercial graphic art: Plexiglas, silkscreen paint, professional computer prints.

In recent years, there has been significant international recognition of AMVK’s work. This substantial survey wants to present her to a larger audience as an innovator of forms and interpreter of moods—for the bloodstream of society as a whole. It is an expanded version of her exhibition What Would I Do in Orbit?, presented at Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach and Kunstverein Hannover in 2016–2017.

On this occasion, the three institutions—M HKA, Kunstverein Hannover and Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach—have collaborated with Koenig Books to publish the monograph AMVK, which surveys AMVK’s visual and textual oeuvre from the early 1970s until today and contains new essays by Menno Grootveld, Travis Jeppesen, Anders Kreuger, Kathleen Rahn & Susanne Titz and Ana Teixeira Pinto.

The exhibition at Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach and the publication were supported by the Flemish Ministry of Culture, Youth, Sports and Media, the Arts Foundation of North Rhine Westphalia and the Hans Fries Foundation. The exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover
and the publication were supported by
the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Stiftung Niedersachsen and the Ministry of Science and Culture of the State of Lower Saxony.

Unless stated otherwise, all works in the exhibition are shown courtesy of the artist and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. We thank the private lenders for their generosity. Last but not least, we thank the artist herself for her unwavering engagement for this project, which also includes the online catalogue of her entire oeuvre, set up by M HKA and now available at amvk.ensembles.org.

M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, is an initiative of the Flemish Community and is supported by the City of Antwerp, Klara, H ART, De Olifant en Allen & Overy.