17.12.23, 11:00, Het Brievenproject van Joseph Willaert

In 1973, Belgian painter Joseph Willaert made a series of letter-size paintings and showed them the following year at Ghent's Galerie Elsa von Honolulu Loringhoven. At the time, the emerging artist was best known for his figurative work and installations that share visual strategies with the pop art movement. Language plays an important role in this, and from the early 1970s takes the form of punitive notes, an essay, to be eventually presented as quotations on canvas. With the letter paintings, the artist surprised by presenting painted versions of existing and fictional letters as painting. In The Letters Project by Joseph Willaert, the paintings will be shown together again for the first time, accompanied by never-before-shown archival material.

In this lecture, curator Godart Bakkers will elaborate on the context of some of the letters, and the significance of these paintings within the broader oeuvre and career of Joseph Willaert, who in the 1970s was also strongly connected to the Ghent art scene.