Brutus

Under the title The Treasure Hunt Edition, fifty Rotterdam-based artists present specific facets of their work across all spaces. From 17 July to 30 August, Brutus becomes an unmissable hunting ground for art explorers.

The curators of The Treasure Hunt Edition, Hajo Doorn and Cokkie Snoei, deliberately avoided an overarching theme or statement, opting instead for an intuitive approach. Based on nominations by fourteen scouts, a broad and diverse selection of artists was assembled. To turn this edition into a true 'treasure hunt', participating artists were invited to present an unknown, surprising or lesser-seen aspect of their work.

In their introduction, the curators take a deliberately restrained position. The artworks are given space to speak for themselves. No lengthy texts filled with complex concepts, insider jargon or social commentary; instead, the focus is on radical simplicity: the art speaks. Essential to the experience of The Treasure Hunt Edition are Brutus's raw, industrial spaces. Visitors are invited to wander freely and discover the richness and quality of Rotterdam's art scene.

An unconventional recipe book unfolds as a living archive, tracing a trajectory from roadkill to restaurant. Animals such as rats, snakes and bats are transformed into gastronomic experiences, challenging dominant systems of value and consumption.

At the centre is Go and Stop Progress (2016–2019), a three-year period during which Davydtchenko lived exclusively from roadkill, by that proposing an alternative system that exists outside of capitalism.

Please note that DEATHBOOK can be visited with an entrance ticket during Art Week. Afterwards, the work can be viewed by appointment by contacting info@ateliervanlieshout.nl.

The installation 'Destroyed House' is the result of a challenging plan to create a semi-permanent architectural installation to be realized in one 'undeveloped', once bricked-up space, almost completely cut off from the outside world and without any daylight. In this building, Teeuwen goes on her usual deconstructive way. To finally come to a brutalist installation, in which two uneven squares are trying to get into a more perfect position. Like a phoenix, which attempts to take a geometric form, but only partially and even for a brief moment, succeeds. An abstract minimalist rhythm, in which the feeling of order, regularity and beauty, as well as insecurity, disruption and destruction is sensible (war is not far away).

'The Engineer’s Bedroom' and 'Disco Inferno' are an industrial monster with an insatiable appetite for its own products. Forty years of artistic research, experimentation and incessant output inform this Gesamtkunstwerk, which can be read as a self-portrait of Van Lieshout as obsessive system builder, seer, inventor, architect, maker of machine sculptures, engineer and shifter of boundaries. Like all AVL works, ‘Disco Inferno’ is an exercise in self-sufficiency. It is a self-sustaining universe – a labyrinth of countless sculptures, handmade machines, hybrid engines, furniture, other artists’ work, utopias and dystopias – “all stemming from the hammer, the ultimate instrument of change”. The industrial monster is composed of giant, in-house designed and built machines, a spaghetti mash of generators, pumps and shredders, all propelled by a bizarre range of sculpted engines that can run on almost anything (vegetable oil, butter or homemade pyrolysis oil). It is a spectacle of industry and its potential in never-ending motion, yet the work’s only real purpose is to keep going – and to heat the jacuzzi in ‘The Happy End of Everything Spa’. Accompanied by the bubbling and pounding of all these machines, “as long as we have oil or waste plastic, we can keep dancing on the edge of the volcano”. JVL With ‘Disco Inferno’, Van Lieshout continues to sculpt a new material vocabulary. Atelier Van Lieshout gained international recognition for living sculptural installations that function to assert or question independence; inventing objects, structures, machines and thematic bodies of work that annihilate the boundaries between art, architecture and design. In Van Lieshout’s distinctive language, everything is an experiment in what “could be”. AVL’s transgressive practice dissects and invents systems to flirt with power, autarky, politics, fertility, life, sex and death.