Pierre Bismuth: Everybody is an artist but only the artist knows it

Under a title that is a nod to German artist Joseph Beuys (“Every human being is an artist”), this exhibition dedicated to Pierre Bismuth (b. 1963, lives and works in Brussels) at Centre Pompidou highlights the singularity of the artist’s practice.

Covering a little more than 20 years of activity, it features a set of works revealing of his method and reflection. What does it mean to be an artist in an age where culture has become part of the leisure industry and where industrial production instantly assimilates every aesthetic issue? How to create artworks in the absence of any specific know-how?

Pierre Bismuth responds by applying the logic of productivism to the artistic field, broadening the skillset as much as possible, whether through his multiple relationships with cinema, or by the creation of strange hybrid industrial materials, the random proliferation of names, the automatic production of geometric abstraction based on national emblems, or quite simply by the creation of a real product from everyday consumption.

The exhibition thus presents about 30 works including a large series of drawings/photograms in which the artist follows the gestures of Marlene Dietrich, Louise Brooks, Catherine Deneuve but also Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan or the famous video installation The Jungle Book Project (2002) in which each Disney character is speaking a different language.

Two new works from 2021 mark this exhibition: Portrait du collectionneur, the Saab automobile that once belonged to the great Belgian collector of conceptual art Herman Daled, in which the upholstery has been entirely redone and now features the names of the artists included in Daled’s collection. The second work, Pierre Bismuth’s Chocolate is a presentation and distribution of chocolate bars whose recipe has been developed by the artist. As the artist says: “if the art public cannot escape its role as cultural consumer, then they might as well eat good chocolate.”

An exhibition catalog is published for the occasion, tracing the artist’s vast oeuvre and including an interview with Jean-Pierre Criqui as well as texts by Bernard Blistène, Marie- José Sondeijker, Dessislava Dimova, Dieter Roelstraete and Asad Raza. Available for purchase on Centre Pompidou’s boutique and on the webshop BY ASSOCIATION. Each catalog comes with Pierre Bismuth’s chocolate bar!

Everybody is an artist but only the artist knows it will be presented again with a different layout at West Den Haag The Hague (NL), from 25/03/22 to 10/07/22.