Automat

The films, paintings, and drawings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (*1963 in Geraardsbergen) overwhelm the viewer through the use of deceleration, precision, and vortex. His seductive works contain timeless images of internal drive and external force, of the latent pressure involved in being human. Behind a veil of stylistic perfection, the artist simulates common rituals of interpretation and meaning by deliberately inserting mistakes and vagaries. His intensely atmospheric images are puzzles involving political and psychological patterns of perceiving the world, which oscillate in a camouflaging, fragile way between inexorable realism and nebulous distance.

With texts by Martin Germann and Hans Rudolf Reust and a foreword by Veit Görner, the volume presents a selection of drawings and excerpts from Borremans’s filmic oeuvre. It also includes a series of new paintings.