GRIMM is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Dirk Braeckman's U.M.-V.P.-16 (2016) by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was made possible by The Photography Council. This is the first acquisition of the artist's work by the museum.
Braeckman’s darkroom functions like a painter’s studio; an area for experimentation where the artist allows freedom, spontaneity and time to influence his creative process. Using tools and techniques to manipulate the negatives, the resulting works possess a tactility rarely seen in photography. Braeckman’s painterly approach stretches the limits of the medium. According to Braeckman, photography is the most subjective experience there is. Far from telling the truth, the medium offers a boundless illusion.
"Braeckman creates his sumptuously tenebrous compositions by mixing and matching negatives from his archive and subjecting them to various unconventional darkroom processes, building complex, mostly grisaille fields in which spatiotemporal distortions rule the day. The resulting works are intimately engaged with questions at the intersection of technology and memory, the marriage of their revenant pictorial fragments conjuring scenarios whose internal logics are haunted by radical indeterminacy."
—Jeffrey Kastner in Artforum, April, 2022.
Exhibition history:
LUSTER./ , GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 20 January – 26 February 2022
Deceptive Images, MARTa Herford, Herford (DE), 31 October 2020 – 15 August 2021
Dirk Braeckman, Contemporary Art Gallery / House of Art, České Budějovice (CZ), 8 May– 9 June
FOCUS: Dirk Braeckman, Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX (US), 26 January - 14 April 2019
Dirk Braeckman, BOZAR, Brussels (BE), 1 February – 29 April 2018
Viva Arte Viva, Belgian Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennial (IT), 13 May – 26 November 2017
