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Posture 54: A glimpse is all I need
Birde Vanheerswynghels
ISBN: 9789491262593
(HB - EN-NL)
€
Birde Vanheerswynghels (b. 1986) studied printmaking & drawing at LUCA School Of Arts Ghent and was laureate of the HISK in 2014.
Birde's work is in the collection of the Flemish Community, both at S.M.A.K. and M HKA, as well as in private collections in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the US and South Africa.
Birde gained particular fame for her monumental charcoal drawings of semi-imaginary, lush plant worlds. In these, she focused on the historical context of botanical gardens. In her work, trees, plants, animals and water features become part of asymmetrical compositions, a universe consisting of ellipses and construction shapes and colours. She draws on historical documentation and stories of European 'explorers', but also makes the link to Google Earth and virtually travels herself to create new, fictional images based on her visual memory and imagination.
Since 2020, she has been working on a series of images that arise from an urgent sense of saying something about the world and the times we live in, a series of portraits of individuals pursuing the image of androgynous beauty. This reversal relates to Birdes encounters within the queer community, a community close to her heart in which relationships often intertwine into family ties. Instead of transporting people to another world, she wants to stand in the world and say something about (her) world and the times we live in.
Birde chooses to paint the portraits with oil on linen, thus adhering to an age-old tradition that explores the materiality and ability of painting to create images beyond time and space.
The characters in the works are not portraits in the sense that they are made after life. The motifs in her paintings may be based on photographs, a colour, a movement or a gesture. Resting, observing, occasionally dancing bodies are recurring subjects. Characters sometimes recur in multiple scenes and have intimate conversations with other figures. With this, Birde once again seeks a fictional, visual reality and tries to arrive at a universal image.
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