A Moveable Feast

Steven Cox & Bas van den Hurk

Galerie Jerome Pauchant

8 January  - 12 March 2016

A Moveable Feast is a duo exhibition featuring the works of Steven Cox and Bas van den Hurk. The exhibition takes the form of an immersive environment where both artists’ paintings and sculptures are displayed on top of a site-specific collaborative floor piece. A Moveable Feast aims to blur the boundaries between presence and absence, past and present and fundamentally each other’s work. A Moveable Feast questions the conventions of presentation and the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy. 

The exhibition title A Moveable Feast comes from the memoirs by the same title that the American author Ernest Hemingway wrote during his stay as an expatriate in Paris during the 1920’s. The book describes Hemingway’s days as a young writer and consists of personal reports, observations and stories.

For Steven Cox and Bas van den Hurk A Moveable Feast has a double connotation that on the one hand refers literally to the materialistic banquet that they as painters regularly absorb themselves in, benefiting from and exploring the flux of liquid materials and the connected natural aging process it goes through afterwards.  But in a metaphorical sense,  A Moveable Feast also refers to the multiple ways one responds to their own place within time and space. Like Heraclitus once famously said ‘You can’t step in the same river twice’ – a phrase that was often referred to by early minimalists such as Robert Morris and Fred Sandback, pointing at the idea that you can always view a work of art in a different way. 

The site specific collaborative work by Cox and Van den Hurk made upon the gallery floor could in this way be interpreted as a stream of materialised thoughts where objects are floating for a period of time that can be viewed and contemplated in ever changing ways. All the works in A Moveable Feast relate for Cox and Van den Hurk to these ambiguous ideas of being both present and absent or between one having them or not. Viewers can become mutual witnesses to the work, negotiating the meaning of it, without ever totally ‘having’ it. This reflects for them important issues of the contemporary: How can we live together? How do we negotiate that? How do we collectively create our environment? How much are we part of networks? These questions are regularly negotiated over and over again in an ongoing dynamic process of making and exhibiting.