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Lot Essay
Dressed in identical, cream-coloured outfits, three figures converge around a table in Michaël Borremans’ short film The Feeding (2006). Between them, sheets of carboard levitate; like the classical Three Graces or Shakespeare’s Wayward Sisters, they are otherworldly beings. Borremans often looks to his own pre-existing imagery to create his meditative worlds. The present work draws heavily from his 2003 painting One at the Time, which features the same cast. These figures then made their film debut in The Storm (2006) before reappearing in The Feeding. In each incarnation, their presence is mysterious and beguiling, and like its painted predecessors, The Feeding poses more questions than it answers. An important early film within Borremans’ oeuvre, it was included in the artist’s solo exhibition Eating the Beard at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and Kunsthalle Budapest in 2011, and in As Sweet As It Gets, which opened at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, in 2014.
Borremans began his career as a painter, adding film to his repertoire in the early 2000s. His first films were exhibited as part of the Berlin Biennale in 2006, the same year he developed The Feeding. Aesthetically and thematically, Borremans’ films are closely tied to his paintings. Both are atmospheric and deny any overt narrative reading. For Borremans, two dimensions often lead to three, with film addressing riddles that a painting could not solve. His films are paintings that have come alive—the tenebrism of The Feeding is particularly pictorial—but above all, Borremans is invested in durability. He wants his films to have ‘presence’; he wants all his art to endure (M. Borremans quoted in H. D. Christ, ‘Man Looking Down at His Hand,’ in Eating the Beard, exh. cat. Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart 2011, p. 23).
Borremans began his career as a painter, adding film to his repertoire in the early 2000s. His first films were exhibited as part of the Berlin Biennale in 2006, the same year he developed The Feeding. Aesthetically and thematically, Borremans’ films are closely tied to his paintings. Both are atmospheric and deny any overt narrative reading. For Borremans, two dimensions often lead to three, with film addressing riddles that a painting could not solve. His films are paintings that have come alive—the tenebrism of The Feeding is particularly pictorial—but above all, Borremans is invested in durability. He wants his films to have ‘presence’; he wants all his art to endure (M. Borremans quoted in H. D. Christ, ‘Man Looking Down at His Hand,’ in Eating the Beard, exh. cat. Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart 2011, p. 23).