New St-Georges gallery to open with exhibition by Christopher Wool

Xavier Hufkens: “Every aspect of our new gallery stems from the vision to create an exceptional platform for our community of artists, many of whom made their start with us here in Brussels. In the 35 years since we opened our first gallery in a warehouse in the city centre, Brussels has flourished into a vibrant epicenter of contemporary art in Europe and internationally. This is a cultural heritage and creative community to which we are proud to belong and deeply committed. We hope that this new space will serve as a dynamic home for our gallery and our artists well into the future.”

Paul Robbrecht (Robbrecht & Daem architects): “For the new St-Georges building, we were given the rare opportunity to reinterpret and quite literally, expand our own architecture. In the early '90s, we repurposed the existing ‘maison de maître’ into a lively art gallery. Now, thirty years later, we opted for an architecture that epitomises the site’s history and extends into a new adjoining building, an impressive concrete structure with a cascade-like form. Variations on light and proportion give each floor a distinct character, which will hopefully compel both the artists and the visitor. Transcending the traditional white-cube, the new St-Georges gallery aims to be a destination that unites the old with the new, the intimate with the monumental.”

The inaugural show will be a major exhibition of recent works in a wide range of media by American artist Christopher Wool (b. 1955), curated by Anne Pontégnie, curator-at-large for Le Consortium (Dijon) and curator for the Cranford Collection (London), and a long-time collaborator with Wool.

Anne Pontégnie: “Through more than fifty works, this exhibition explores how reproduction is at the heart of Christopher Wool’s practice. It is a journey into Wool’s process and modes of thinking. He has never ceased to create challenging forms and to question his own practice. It is also the result of a thirty-year dialogue with the artist and a thirty-year friendship with Xavier Hufkens, a question of mutual trust. The new gallery's scale and architecture offer the perfect setting to develop such a complex and dense project.”