Studio Job
Based on a recipe for a good wedding, Job Smeets’s exhibition has an added pinch of provocation, a spoonful of wit and a dash of radicalism.
Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery
21st December 2019 – 5th January 2020
By TDE News / 16th December 2019
Studio Job, ‘Buoy Mirror ¥€$’, 2015
COURTESY: Studio Job
TO LAUNCH THE holiday season, Belgian gallerist Samuel Vanhoegaerden is opening a new show of work by the renowned Milan-based conceptual artist and designer, Studio Job. In 2015 the gallery, based in the Flemish town of Knokke, hosted the notorious ‘Banana Show’, where Job Smeets introduced his brilliantly simple, provocative banana lights. “Since then, we have wanted to do a second show,” Vanhoegaerden explains.
Studio Job, ‘Pound’, 2018
COURTESY: Studio Job
The show is called ‘¥€$ ¥€$!’ as if in an ecstasy of enthusiasm for this holiday romance, and it takes its structure from the proverbial recipe for a good wedding: as Vanhoegaerden says, “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” So visitors to this coastal resort will be regaled with ‘something old’, represented by the ‘Cat Fight’, a classic Studio Job work based on Smeet’s own cats – but also evoking our current feral politics. For ‘something new’, the studio is showing brand new pieces from the 2019 ‘Money’ collection, an exuberantly scathing commentary on the art world. ‘The Money Roll’ holds your flowers in a roll of banknotes, while a currency mirror reflects your wealth.
Studio Job, ‘Money Roll’, 2018
COURTESY: Studio Job
The ‘something borrowed’ is the only remaining unsold edition of the Chess set, on loan to the gallery, a large-scale bronze work that represents in miniature, in painstaking detail, the entire twenty years sculptural oeuvre of Studio Job. And finally ‘something blue’ is suggested by the ‘Weeping Lanterns’, also from 2019, a collection of sorrowful bronze street lamps, here pictured melting in the embers of the fire-ravaged Notre Dame.
Studio Job, ‘Weeping Lanterns 2019 Notre Dame’, 2019
COURTESY: COURTESY: Studio Job
Vanhoegaerden says, “My town is a weekend and holiday town. So the two weeks of Christmas and New Year are among our busiest. The winter time, with the lamps bright in the streets, and all the Christmas decorations, seemed the best moment to show these weeping lanterns, cat lights and bold candle holders.” Studio Job will take over the whole gallery to install the works, bringing Smeet’s radical imagination to this normally quiet edge of Europe.
Studio Job, ‘Sconce – patinated’, 2019
COURTESY: Studio Job
Prices range from €5,000 – €50,000.
Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery – art gallery in Knokke-Heist, Belgium.
Compiled by The Design Edit team
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