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拍品專文
‘The images are unfinished: they remain open. That’s what makes them durable’ (Michaël Borremans)
Painted in 2003, Michaël Borremans’s Sweet Disposition is an emblematic example of the artist’s intimate, enigmatic, and inscrutable canvases. The painting shows a woman dressed in a simple grey pinafore. Her face is obscured as she looms in rapt and almost ritualistic focus over her task, and her nimble hands have the assured aspect of someone familiar with their craft. She appears to be engaged in some kind of design work, using a knife to prise up part of a pattern of ribbons held taut to the table by pins. Scattered across the surface, tiny white fragments of material catch the light. Executed with deft brushwork and suffused in a rich chiaroscuro, in this painting Borremans consummately channels the techniques and traditions which have propelled painting across the centuries. Dating to the artist’s international breakthrough period—the ensuing years would see travelling museum exhibitions across Europe, the UK and the US—Sweet Disposition presents a compelling meditation on the nature of images.
Working from his studio on the outskirts of Ghent in his native Belgium, Borremans’s oeuvre spans film, photography and sculpture, although he is best known for his alluring and uncanny oil paintings. As in the present work, his figures’ faces are often shielded, and attention is drawn instead to their hands, as conduits for an exploration of materiality and craft. Borremans painted several works related to tailoring across the early 2000s, drawing inspiration from Barbara Burman’s 1999 treatise The Culture of Sewing, which examined home dressmaking within the frame of material culture. In her preoccupation with the task at hand, the figure in Sweet Disposition is oblivious to the viewer’s presence, and her technical precision and material focus echo the craft of painting itself. As in the present work, Borremans’ figures are typically engaged in ordinary tasks rendered disquieting and strange. The canvas both reveals and conceals, suggesting that what is in plain sight is itself merely the painted patina of some greater and yet more elusive meaning.
Borremans’s singular realist style has drawn parallels with artists ranging from Diego Velázquez to Édouard Manet. He embraces the traditions of painting as a tool for dissecting the modern psyche, and the meaning of images in our contemporary time. Like his fellow Belgian painter René Magritte, Borremans reveals the strange and surreal embedded in the contours of everyday life. In Sweet Disposition, a dramatic light illuminates the drama of the canvas. Its shadowy depths, cast into darkness, suggest psychological unease, as does the implied sharpness of the knife, which jars playfully with the painting’s saccharine title. Like a film-still, Sweet Disposition seems to both withhold and suggest narrative, prompting the viewer to continue the absorbing, eldritch scene in the recesses of their mind.
Painted in 2003, Michaël Borremans’s Sweet Disposition is an emblematic example of the artist’s intimate, enigmatic, and inscrutable canvases. The painting shows a woman dressed in a simple grey pinafore. Her face is obscured as she looms in rapt and almost ritualistic focus over her task, and her nimble hands have the assured aspect of someone familiar with their craft. She appears to be engaged in some kind of design work, using a knife to prise up part of a pattern of ribbons held taut to the table by pins. Scattered across the surface, tiny white fragments of material catch the light. Executed with deft brushwork and suffused in a rich chiaroscuro, in this painting Borremans consummately channels the techniques and traditions which have propelled painting across the centuries. Dating to the artist’s international breakthrough period—the ensuing years would see travelling museum exhibitions across Europe, the UK and the US—Sweet Disposition presents a compelling meditation on the nature of images.
Working from his studio on the outskirts of Ghent in his native Belgium, Borremans’s oeuvre spans film, photography and sculpture, although he is best known for his alluring and uncanny oil paintings. As in the present work, his figures’ faces are often shielded, and attention is drawn instead to their hands, as conduits for an exploration of materiality and craft. Borremans painted several works related to tailoring across the early 2000s, drawing inspiration from Barbara Burman’s 1999 treatise The Culture of Sewing, which examined home dressmaking within the frame of material culture. In her preoccupation with the task at hand, the figure in Sweet Disposition is oblivious to the viewer’s presence, and her technical precision and material focus echo the craft of painting itself. As in the present work, Borremans’ figures are typically engaged in ordinary tasks rendered disquieting and strange. The canvas both reveals and conceals, suggesting that what is in plain sight is itself merely the painted patina of some greater and yet more elusive meaning.
Borremans’s singular realist style has drawn parallels with artists ranging from Diego Velázquez to Édouard Manet. He embraces the traditions of painting as a tool for dissecting the modern psyche, and the meaning of images in our contemporary time. Like his fellow Belgian painter René Magritte, Borremans reveals the strange and surreal embedded in the contours of everyday life. In Sweet Disposition, a dramatic light illuminates the drama of the canvas. Its shadowy depths, cast into darkness, suggest psychological unease, as does the implied sharpness of the knife, which jars playfully with the painting’s saccharine title. Like a film-still, Sweet Disposition seems to both withhold and suggest narrative, prompting the viewer to continue the absorbing, eldritch scene in the recesses of their mind.