Peter Downsbrough
Peter Downsbrough
11.09. – 24.10.2021

The American conceptual artist and photographer Peter Downsbrough (*1940) has lived and worked in Brussels since 1989. In the early 1960s, he studied architecture and art at the University of Cincinnati and Cooper Union in New York City, and subsequently attended painting classes at the Art Students League.

After studying architecture, Peter Downsbrough began producing sculptural works, works on paper, photographs, films, videos, sound pieces and artist books. He has published more than 75 artist books. Downsbrough’s sculptures and interventions in public space consist of horizontal and vertical black bars on which words or fragments of words are arranged. In doing so, he examines language as a medium of art.

Peter Downsbrough’s works are based on lines, letters, cuts and spaces that refer to architectural space and question the linearity of space and language. His highly reduced visual vocabulary consists of short and concise conjunctions and prepositions, such as AND, AS, OR, TO, IF, BUT, FROM, WITH, HERE, THERE, MAAR, OP, EN, ET, OU, MAIS. These have a dual function. On the one hand, they are iconographic signs that describe the space and, on the other, they give the viewer the opportunity to move from one thought to the next and to establish a connection between individual parts of the sentence or elements.

In 2003, Peter Downsbrough’s work was honored with a retrospective in his adopted home of Brussels at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, which was subsequently shown at the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, France (2003-04), and at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lódz, Poland (2004).

Since the late 1960s, Peter Downsbrough has been one of the leading artists whose work moves between minimalism, conceptual art and visual poetry.

Curated by Klaus Becké.