GUILLAUME BIJL

Guillaume Bijl is a Belgian sculptor, installation and video artist. He divides his work in four categories: ’transformation installations’, in which he changes the art gallery or the museum into a common and pragmatical reality like driving schools and supermarkets; ’situation installations’, which are concrete, although almost invisible, interventions in reality and usually part of an art manifestation, for instance his placing stuffed seagulls in their natural surroundings in Hoorn in the Netherlands; ’compositions trouvées’, an allusion to Marcel Duchamp, in which he gathers various found objects and, last but not least, ’sorry’s’, in which he puts together existing objects in an absurd way. Displeased with the cerebral of the conceptual art of the seventies, he started working on installation in which he reconstructed the daily reality. The social context and the location influenced his choices. This elevated realism changes to surrealism and the absurd. In 1979 Bijl opened his first installation, a driving school in a gallery. He continued building this kind of installations in the eighties. Endless series of shops, hairdressers, a psychiatric institute and so on emerged. With his spaces he creates confusion. Visitors are made aware of the unrealness of reality. On the contrary to the ready mades of Duchamp, Bijl doesn’t isolate the objects from their surroundings. He only changes the context, thus showing the banality and ugliness of our world. For the ‘documenta IX’ exhibition in 1992 he created a shop window filled with wax sculptures. The artist poses questions about the artificial values of society and the statute of contemporary art. In 1998-1999 he dressed up a pavilion according to the four seasons. In 2000 he made the video ’James Ensor in Oostende ca. 1920’, a fake “found footage montage” of him and James Ensor taking a walk on the seaside, in the 20’s. In 2008 Bijl had a major solo exhibition in S.M.A.K in Ghent where he exhibited his six different museums (of eroticism, of lederhosen, or bidets and so on) for the first time.