Bert Timmermans

Bert Timmermans I Exorcising the Metropolis is composed of eight series totalling forty-three works, forty in mixed media on cardboard, and three in serigraphy and mixed media on aluminium, all created from 2013 to 2015. One work, independent from the aforementioned series, is in serigraphy on paper. The exhibition is accompanied by an 88-page illustrated hardback catalogue featuring an interview of the artist conducted by the Belgian audio-visual expert, writer, journalist and film director, Henri Roanne-Rosenblatt, Dean of the Office of the Royal Belgian Film Archive and member of the Union of Film Critics.
Bert Timmermans, born in 1976, is a Belgian artist, art historian, archivist, historian and author living and working in Antwerp. He received his doctoral degree in art history from the Catholic University of Leuven. His practice is rooted in the tradition of pioneering early twentieth century cultural theorists and archival image archeologists Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, who studied the nexus between iconology and media, image and history.
Timmermans' art deals with the stratification of history, its memory and amnesia, along with all of its replete as well as void spaces, and how these metamorphose reality. He is fascinated with the concept of time and how it re-dimensions reality by depositing and removing strata on and from the collective memory.
The stratification and removal of media from the pictorial surface, construction and de-construction, are at the heart of Timmermans' creative process. It is about adding, deleting and re-contextualising visual information. He telescopes the past through the present. Unlike his illustrious precursors Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield, Alexander Rodchenko, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Timmermans assembles archival, historical, not contemporary images.