BRIDFAS
British Decorative and Fine Arts Society
of Brussels
BRIDFAS Events 2011-2012
Upcoming Events
BRIDFAS Study Day
Visit to the Magritte Museum
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
Following the Magritte lecture on March 14th, we will be holding a study day to visit the Magritte Museum, one of Brussels’ most recent jewels.
Opened in June, 2009, the Magritte Museum displays works of the surrealist artist after whom it is named. Located in the heart of Brussels at the Place Royale, the museum is housed in the neo-classical landmark Altenloh Hotel, which was superbly restored in 1984. It operates as part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
The museum’s multi-disciplinary collection is unrivalled. It contains more than 200 works consisting of oils on canvas, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects as well as advertising posters, musical scores, vintage photographs and films produced by the artist.
The collection comprises purchases by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, which owns the collection, and gifts from the Irène Hamoir-Scutenaire and Georgette Magritte estates. Additionally, many private collectors, as well as public and private institutions, loan art to the museum through an ambitious lending program.
A guided tour in English has been arranged for a group of 15 persons, and tickets will be allocated on a "first paid, first served" basis with preference given to members. The charge for the Study Day will be €20 per person. If you are interested in attending, please Contact Us and we will send you the appropriate bank details.
We will meet at the entrance to the museum at Koningsplein 1 Place Royale at 10:45 and the tour will begin at 11:00. Insurance is the responsibility of the participant.
An a la carte lunch can be had at the café of the Belvue Musuem at Place des Palais 7 at the end of the exhibition. The café is right across the square form the Fine Arts Museum, and there is no need to reserve.
Previous Events
BRIDFAS Study Day
"Abstract" By Alfredo Volpi
“Art in Brazil: 1950-2011”
Saturday, January 14, 2012
This study day was held in conjunction with our January lecture, “Baroque to Brasilia”, about the life and work of the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.
In the late 1940s, there was a growing demand for a system to determine what was and what was not modern in Brazilian art. Modernism could not provide the answer; it had become too local and no longer provided any conventions or aesthetic definitions. In 1952, the Grupo Ruptura was established in São Paulo and with their rationally structured, geometrical abstract works, these artists distanced themselves from the regional, obligatory Brazilian iconography and social critique of the Modernists. The Grupo Ruptura called itself the first Brazilian avant-garde movement. This exhibition traces the evolution of Brazilian art from the 1950s until the present day and is the first exhibition in Europe to address this from a Brazilian and not a predominantly Western perspective.
There are four chronological modules in the exhibition : the 1950s, the decade 1960-70, the 1980s, and the 1990s until today. These modules are interspersed with sections that explore the work of specific artists in more detail, including Alfredo Volpi, and the Brazilian context – for example, the role of architecture in the period of the dictatorship (1964-1985) – during which the art developed.
A private guided tour of the exhibition was arranged for BRIDFAS members. The tour, given in English, commenced at 11:00 hours and will lasted approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.
BRIDFAS Study Day 2011
Photograph (c. 1970) of
Gerhard Richter
by Lothar Wolleh
Visit to the Tate Modern in London
Monday - 31st October 2011
Gerhard Richter: Panorama
The 2011 BRIDFAS Study Day was planned to take advantage of the Tate Modern exhibition "Gerhard Richter: Panorama".
Spanning nearly five decades and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major chronological retrospective that groups together significant moments of this remarkable painter’s career. It includes portraits based on photographs such as the famous “Betty 1988”, abstractions, subtle landscapes, colour charts, works on paper, mirrors and three important glass constructions.
Gerhard Richter Reader 1994
Courtesy San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
© Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating canvases reminiscent of the bombings of Dresden and paintings of family members who had been members as well as victims of the Nazis. In 1988 he produced the 15-part work “October 18, 1977”, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group.
Richter continues to respond to significant moments in history. The final room of the exhibition features “September 2005”, a painting about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.
Alongside works responding to historical events, the show presents many of Richter’s most ambitious abstract paintings including his 1974 colour chart containing 4,096 different coloured squares, his 20-metre long “Stroke of 1980”, presented for the first time outside Germany and the magisterial and richly coloured “Forest Squeegee” paintings of 1990. The culmination is the hauntingly beautiful six-part series “Cage” from 2006 on long-term loan to the Tate.
Gerhard Richter: Panorama is curated by Tate Director Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey.