POSTCARD FROM GENOVA

with Michael Beutler, Mariana Castillo Deball, Luca De Leva, Mark Dion, Invernomuto, Koo Jeong A, Tobias Putrih, Jorge Queiroz, Tomás Saraceno, Bojan Šarčević, Georgina Starr, Luca Trevisani, Cesare Viel

an exhibition in collaboration with Pinksummer (Genoa, IT) 

opening Saturday June 3, 5-8pm

on view through July 8

in Brussels, BE

"There will be two exhibitions, the first by Pinksummer at the Walburger Wouters gallery in Brussels, and the second in Genoa by Walburger Wouters in the space of Pinksummer in Palazzo Ducale. The trait d’union of the two galleries is the artist Mark Dion, represented by both.

A democratic way of putting galleries on the road similar to the house swapping in which people interested to visit each other’s countries agree to stay at home without having to address to organized trips and expensive tourist accommodation.

The titles of the exhibitions are Postcard from Genova and Postcard from Brussels. The invitations hark back to the romantic heritage of the postcard that lets one imagine slow travel and prolonged stays, in the case of the galleries, compared to the temporal frenzy of the fairs.

This is the typical divided back picture postcard, invented by the Anglo-Saxons in 1902, in which the back is divided by a vertical line: to the right for the postmarks and the name and address of the addressee; to the left for the sender’s communi- cation and greetings, so that one side remains entirely available for the illustration, usually a landscape photo. Come to think of it, postcards are the only two-dimen- sional objects with three divisions.

In the case of postcards, the illustrations that you don’t see on the invitations will be the exhibitions that are intended somehow like landscapes, group shows generated by the solo shows that follow one another in the usual programming of the galleries, consisting of artworks of the artists represented. Exhibitions in which an attempt will be made to render a concise and positive image, with perfect weather, a sunny day and blue skies. The illustrated postcard is a symbol of modernity: concise, easy and light. Postcards initially had to contain a maximum of five words, otherwise they were considered by the traditional postal service as insufficiently franked letters. It seems that at the beginning of the 20th century, the postcard boom was an international phe- nomenon linked to the expansion and rise of the middle class. The upper classes snubbed the postcard because they considered it too cheap and vulgar with that uncovered message, the lower classes ignored it because it was deemed to be too expensive and useless considering that illiteracy was still widespread. For the middle class, it became a status symbol because it showed that they could travel around the world, that they could buy an unnecessary item and send it off, good taste was entrusted to the choice of image. Somehow to the middle class that the global economic trend tends to make disappear is owed most of the substance of modernity and its revolutions, even those that got out of hand. Postcards dealing with collaborative mode also tends to fit into the idea of a slightly more circular economy.

In the exhibition Postcard from Genova, Pinksummer will present a group show in Brussels lasting more than four weeks with artworks by Michael Beutler, Mariana Castillo Deball, Mark Dion, Invernomuto, Koo Jeong A, Tobias Putrih, Jorge Quiroz, Tomás Saraceno, Bojan Šarčević, Georgina Starr, Luca Trevisani, Cesare Viel and a project in the outdoor courtyard of Walburger Wouters - Thyself Agency by Luca De Leva.

In the exhibition Postcard from Brussels, Walburger Wouters gallery will present an exhibition in Genoa of similar duration, presenting artworks by Elen Braga, Eli Cortiñas, Mark Dion, Filip Van Dingenen, Matthias Dornfeld, Charles Hascoët, Delphine Hennelly, Gerard Herman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Klara Hobza, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Geert Marijnissen and Julien Saudubray."