Bertrand Lavier and Walter Swennen in Super Conceptual Pop
1 April—31 October 2025
Group exhibition at Fondation CAB, Brussels, Belgium
In 2000, Stefan Brüggemann began Show Titles, an iconoclastic, never-ending list of exhibition titles made available to all by the artist – which requires only the use of capitalised Arial Black and asks only to appear in the list of artists and works shown.
Situated between Dadaism and conceptual art, historical references that Brüggemann likes to quote, here is a short sample, from among over 800 titles available, to confirm this heritage: “The New conceptualists”, “Unconceptual”, “Post-invisible”, “Intellectual disaster”, “Why didn’t you make it larger?”, “Why didn’t you make it smaller?”, “ Don’t read books”, “ Stolen thoughts”, “Already made”, “Smart punk”, “Art at the age of extinction”, “Continually revealing multiple routes of entry and exit”, “Things on the wall” , “Make art without hands”, “When I shit I look at Andy Warhol’s books”, “Unproductivism”, “Bad conceptual artist”, “Super conceptual pop”. Through this list, a resolutely humorous portrait of the artist emerges. Dadaist and conceptual? Perhaps. But officially, pop and conceptual – even, as Brüggemann puts it, “twisted conceptual pop”. The “Super conceptual pop” exhibition takes as its starting point one of Brüggemann’s eponymous Show titles to champion a new, twisted chapter in the relationship between conceptual and pop aesthetics in contemporary creation. Through the works of Pierre Bismuth, Martin Creed, Camila Fairclough, Bertrand Lavier, Jonathan Monk, Elsa Werth and Walter Swennen among others, this twist offers a fresh approach to conceptual art, that simultaneously celebrates a form of nihilism, reminiscent of Dada, and exhibits itself in the realm of amusement and merchandise. A joyful conceptualism!