Kasper Bosmans: A Perfect Shop-front

From February 17 to May 14, 2021, with the exhibition A Perfect Shop-Front by Kasper Bosmans (Lommel, Belgium; 1990), Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro presents the first instalment of the new Project Room exhibition cycle, an “observatory” project dedicated to the most recent developments in the international artistic panorama, under the guidance of guest curator Eva Fabbris for the 2021 season. 

In his practice, Kasper Bosmans associates socio-political themes and different historical-cultural contexts in forms which draw on heraldry, folkloristic symbolism, the tradition of the ready-made, and the history of decoration. Combined in a completely subjective way, these elements merge into works that narrate new mythologies, in an attempt to find new ways of communicating knowledge. 

For Project Room #13 the artist has designed an intervention in which the elements of his lexicon are deployed to address strictly contemporary issues such as the breaking apart of natural ecosystems and the physical limitations imposed by the pandemic. The group of works triggers a dimension of flânerie that is anything but disengaged, in which the viewer encounters references to political consciousness in forms that take their cue from a radical approach to folk art, between concept and history of materials. 

A painted floor frieze crosses the space of the Foundation, a decorative and symbolic element that transforms the space in an enigmatic way. Entitled Wolf Corridors & Stamp Forest (2020), the work narrates the relationship between the European highway network and the portions of nature that remain trapped by high-speed roadways, interfering with the migratory habits of wild animals such as wolves, for which sections of forest are artificially safeguarded to allow them to move freely. 

The installation A Perfect Shop-Front (2021), which gives the exhibition its title, was created expressly for the Foundation. In a sort of display window that recalls those of the traditional houses of the Low Countries, Bosmans arranges objects tied to the political and cultural history of the United States collected privately by the artist: together with their display system, these objects—books, posters, photographs, etc—create a short circuit between the public and private dimensions, between politics and the micro-histories narrated by the individual objects.

A similar ambiguity is encountered in Vermiculated Rustication (2016), a wall drawing that represents a fake stone wall, a Renaissance bugnato that was revived by the Milanese design culture of the 1980s, which visually evokes the small tunnels dug by worms in the soil.

Project Room #13 confirms Bosmans’ predilection for an approach to sculpture informed by installation art, in which the artist inserts in all his exhibitions—included this one—small paintings entitled Legend (2020): allusive compositions of symbols, heraldic motifs, signs and codes that act as a narrative pathway through the three-dimensional works. 

The show, designed for the Foundation, was conceived remotely. In doing so, Bosmans puts a further meaning—tied to the historical contingency, to the method whereby the artist delegates the execution of the work and its setting to others, an historical nod to the fringe of conceptual art closest to Dada, with the aim of questioning the notion of authorship to the point of being able to embrace the intervention of chance. 

For Bosmans, a proponent of this tradition, the idea of operating at a distance by sharing instructions also means emphasizing the dynamics of work, the division of roles, and the chain of subjectivity that leads to “creation.”

A publication is dedicated to A Perfect Shop-Front, featuring a conversation between Kasper Bosmans and Roger Hiorns on the themes of the exhibition.