Walter Van Beirendonck - W:A.R. = Walter About Rights at Galerie Polaris in Paris
Known for his use of intense colors with a very graphic style, Walter Van Beirendonck takes his inspiration from nume- rous sources : politics, ecology, music, litterature, sexuality...
Both in the field of fashion and design, Walter Van Beirendonck gives as much importance to his production as his re- search. Mutations and clothing graft applied to the skin allow the spectator to enter a unique universe. Like the Imaginary Museum by André Malraux, Walter Van Beirendonck creates a « glamour trash » space where the multifaceted complexity of his work takes shape.
Walter Van Beirendonck always created without ever being preoccupied by trends and directions that the fashion industry could have suggested. But like Thessaly La Force wrote in the September 3rd 2019 issue of New York Times : « He is the last punk, one whose work can today feel predictive in it’s obsessions and transgressions, and to which contemporary fashion owes a debt. »
In a permanant challenge, the artist presents a work mixing colours, textures, techniques, abstraction and figuration and confirms his attachment to contemporary art. It is in this same vein that his second solo exhibition at Galerie Polaris, W:A.R. = Walter About Rights, will take place. In this new exhibition, we will be presented a series of hand-beaded and hand-embroidered SCARECROWS, carrying messages like only Walter van Beirendonck likes to display them openly on the titles of his collections: REQUIRE BEAUTY, RESPECT, STOP TERRORIZING OUR PLANET, SAVE THE SEX etc. As well as a series of miniature hand-beaded sculptures that will also refer to the above messages and of course the symbol of the Walterman (effigy of Walter) which will also be included in these sculptures.
Often considered like a rebel artist, quirky, punk-revolutionnary, but always with sincerity and independance, Walter Van Beirendonck is still today one of the only disruptor of codes in men’s fashion. It is not because he wishes to shock the bourgeoisie that Walter Van Beirendonck includes elements of sexual fetichisation. To the contrary, it is with humor that the artist refers to Marx’s notion of secret fetichism, or even the concept of anthropological fetichism rite like magic charms. Fetichism then appears as double of fashion ; another costume of authority. In this desire to go beyond the no- tion of physical normality, a new kind of beauty appears.
And it is with this same freedom of expression drawing our attention to the world’s issues that Walter begins a major artistic questioning : the place, function and representation of the body in our time. While evoking political and social tensions such as the place of the LGBTQ+ or the exclusion of people of colour, the artist manages to share his vision of a world in constant struggle. Like a contemporary René Magritte, Walter Van Beirendonck reinvents Belgian surrealism by opening up our reality to other perspectives.
PRACTICAL:
Walter Van Beirendonck - W:A.R. = Walter About Rights
January 21st until February 22nd 2020
Galerie Polaris, 15 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003 Paris
+33 1 42 72 21 27, www.galeriepolaris.fr