Michaël Borremans: Eating the Beard - Tapa dura

This catalogue assembles a comprehensive overview featuring more than one hundred works by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (*1963 in Geraardsbergen). Besides paintings, drawings, and films stemming from the last ten years, the presentation includes a series of new works. Borremans’s drawings, paintings, and films are closely intertwined; the artist operates in an area bordered by all the various media. His scenarios are full of references and allusions that afford viewers a variety of possible interpretations while resisting being joined together to form a definitive whole. What are actually mutually exclusive elements, such as realism and fantasy, the ephemeral and the manifest, irony and confusion, are closely interwoven in his visual worlds, and there is only a fine line between a recognizable, everyday reality and a bizarre dream world.