BRUSSELS.- The internationally-acclaimed New York musician and visual artist Charlemagne Palestine has been living and working in Brussels for over 20 years. 44 years after his legendary performance in the Horta Hall, the artist is presenting his first major solo exhibition in Belgium. A unique opportunity to see his totemic animist sculptures and discover his magic musical universe, constructed with fascinating shapes and sounds, which creates a Sacred Bordello – mesmerising and radical.
Charlemagne Palestine is a very active artist on the international arts scene, who lives in Brussels. Born in 1947 in New York, he was part of the Soho and Tribeca creative underground scene in the sixties and seventies. During his career, he shared programmes in the same venues as artists and musicians like John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Gilbert & George, Gordon Matta-Clark, Phil Glass and Steve Reich.
Charlemagne Palestine has always been an unpredictable and provocative multidisciplinary artist, whose work defies classification. He presents his works throughout Europe and the United States, performing his electronic and acoustic ritualistic sound and body works as well as video art screenings and multimedia installations. Recently, he has been best known for his ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ installations that present all aspects and dimensions of his artistic personality including his use of iconic soft toys, some of which accompany him everywhere he goes, as divinities or totems during his performances, presentations, talks, and exhibitions. Charlemagne Palestine has performed and exhibited at the Louvre, the Centre Pompidou and the MAHJ in Paris, the Biennale di Venezia, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York City, and most recently at Witte De With in Rotterdam, the Kunsthalle Wien and a monumental ‘Gesamtkunst’ installation with 18,000 animal divinities in Los Angeles. His ground-breaking 6-metre tall ‘God Bear’, which he created for Documenta 8 in 1987 in Kassel, was voted on the 50th anniversary of Documenta as one of the most popular and beloved sculptures they had ever presented.
Charlemagne’s first performance in Belgium took place in 1974 in the Horta Hall of the Centre for Fine Arts, at the invitation of the then director Karel Geirlandt and Hergé, cementing his ties with Belgium, where he moved in 1999 and where he has established his ‘CharleWorld’ studio.
The Centre for Fine Arts is thus the perfect place for the first major retrospective in Belgium of Charlemagne Palestine’s work. But as Charlemagne is wary of the implication that a retrospective is like some kind of retirement, he has preferred to use a Yiddish mockery of the term retrospective by choosing the title SSCHMMETTRROOSSPPECCTIVVE. He feels this term does not mark the beginning and end of an artistic career, but instead paves the way for new discoveries, for the exploration of new universes. That is why the exhibition will also take place in the antechambers of the Centre for Fine Arts. For three months, his alter egos, his totems and divinities, pianos, colourful fabrics, photos, paintings and sound installations, which make up the universe of CharleWorld, will occupy the hallowed halls designed by Victor Horta.
