Legrand combines painting with drawing, cartoons, and pop culture with aesthetic references to North European history painting and Surrealist traditions – the post-modern world overlaid onto the art historical atmosphere in which he was raised.
Enari Gallery is excited to announce the solo exhibition While you were sleeping, with new paintings by Wim Legrand.
Legrand’s solo exhibition, While you were sleeping, describes the stuff of funny dreams – funny ha-ha and funny strange, dreams both unconscious and lucid – of events and encounters unfolding in the moments between waking and sleeping, between online and (never really) offline. Within the uncertain hours and dimensions of a twilight stage, familiar, forgettable objects assemble – or disassemble – in varying states of predicament and vitality, in delicious disarrays of misplaced punchlines. Artworks function like tragicomic tableaus discovered under the bed and in the closet, hiding behind the door, frozen under the streetlamp. These are still-lifes of a sort, comprising lifeless unicorns, fabricated flowers, goofy grins hiding sharp teeth, piquant tigers, sausages and stalks, and an assortment of tubes of non-descript function, all rendered in sweet hues and marshmallow pastels. With objects on edge, pierced, dazed; things decapitated, things defiant, they are reminiscent of vanitas paintings, but mortality is questionable and meaning ambiguous. They send out mixed signals, telling open-ended stories and awkward jokes, even providing sanctuary for private thoughts.
Wim Legrand’s (b. 1978) work offers a playful take on the paradoxical strangeness of everyday reality while commenting on our postmodern condition as victims of the barrage of information and news feeds. Mundane and forgettable objects usher the familiar into peculiar allegorical narratives, where past blurs with present and fact with fiction – setting scenes in a liminal zone, in the unfettered “now” of a dream, meanings just out of reach and continually open to interpretation. He combines painting with drawing, cartoons, and pop culture with aesthetic references to the North. European history painting and Surrealist traditions – the post-modern world overlaid onto the art historical atmosphere in which he was raised. To date, Legrand has held solo shows in Belgium and South Africa and has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the globe. His most recent accolades include a group exhibition in Shanghai and a residency at Belgium’s renowned Frans Masereel Center. While you were sleeping is his first
solo in The Netherlands.
