Belgian artist Lili Dujourie, whose career spans close to 60 years, achieved acclaim in the 1980s with her use of velvet as a sculptural substance rich in implications. Many artists who appropriate largely ignored materials continue to exploit them for years as a trademark, but not so with Dujourie. She focuses on a medium or material for a relatively short period and then jumps on to something else that requires other techniques and brings up new themes. Or does the wish to take on new subjects lead to a search for the appropriate medium to render those ideas? Dujourie leaves the question unanswered.
Because she does not divulge much by way of words, we have to conclude that Dujourie wants her work to speak for itself. Her range is remarkable, going from Minimalist geometric abstraction to a lush, mid-career, neo-Renaissance or neo-Baroque form of sculpture in her signature velvet pieces, which straddle the edge of a fragmentary figurative representation, replete with references to draperies. She has taken on the human body—reclining and standing, in motion and repose—architectural space, variations in natural light over the course of an open span of time, and still-life, using a wide variety of materials, techniques, and compositional strategies over the years. Her works, with their often allusive titles, explore authoritarianism at a cultural and political level, memory, and thus history, stagings for undetermined performances and stories without narrative.
Michaël Amy: Your career was launched in 1970, when there was little support in Belgium for living artists.
Lili Dujourie: Indeed. My work was featured in group exhibitions starting in 1968, and from 1970 onward in solo gallery exhibitions, like my show at X-ONE gallery in Antwerp. . .
. . . Subscribe to print and/or digital editions of Sculpture to read the full article.
