HERFORD, GERMANY.- In his extensive farewell exhibition at Marta Herford, founding director Jan Hoet presents a multiplicity of artistic perspectives and aspects on the theme of loss of control: “Loss of Control: Crossing the boundaries to art from Félicien Rops to the present, on view through January 25 2009.

“Losing control can mean losing control over one’s own self and expressing the rigid and constraining limits of our lives in images that reveal obsession, repression, and social taboo. Control implies exposing yourself to challenges, that you get to know the inner constraints, fears, passions, and impositions with which people – not just artists – have to live and work today.” Jan Hoet, on Loss of Control

“Madness and enchantment share many similarities. A magician is an artist of madness.” Novalis, New Fragments – From the Secret World (1798)

Obsession, sexuality, madness and death – the continuing exchange between art and life is the theme of the exhibition LOSS OF CONTROL (1/11/2008–25/1/2009). After an eight-year engagement as the inspirational founding director of the Marta Herford museum, Jan Hoet is saying farewell with a show comprising over 400 works. All the pieces speak about the artistic search for authentic means of expression above and beyond societal norms, and convey in unprecedented depth the varying aspects of loss of control, boundary crossing, and madness.

Félicien Rops - The centrepiece of the exhibition is a series of works by the Belgian symbolist Félicien Rops (1833-1898), drawn from all periods of his career. Rops – simultaneously a painter, lithographer, draughtsman, illustrator and engraver – was one of the foremost artists of the late 19th century. His work railed against the bourgeoisie and their culture of taboos, with its narcissistic fixation on the outward appearance of things. His frequently satirical works caricature the morals and mores of his time. Women, in Rops’ work, appear as demonic and powerful figures, laden with satanic and sexual overtones, they epitomise the decadent lusts of the bourgeoisie. Rops employed shock as an aesthetic experience, to shatter convention. The images of the sexualised bodies of women led his contemporaries to examine their own unconscious desires. He saw himself as a champion of a free art, who never sought to hide his contempt for the purveyors of ‘official’ art and the wider public. At the same time he was occupied by the social questions of his time. A meeting with Baudelaire was, apparently, instrumental in laying the foundations for his work.

Jacques Charlier - The contemporary Belgian artist Jacques Charlier (b. 1939) shares Rops’ desire to goad the observer into far-reaching self-examination. Charlier prefers working between disciplines and media. He is equally at home with painting, photography, music, writing, sculpture and installations as he is with comic-book art. The Belgian artist has always cast a mischievous-subversive eye over the world of art. In his works – in which the dramatisation of the female always plays a central role – he references, caricatures, queries and repudiates the artistic avant-garde and in so doing creates his own work which parodies the modern.

Art and psychiatry - LOSS OF CONTROL is further accompanied by other independent visual worlds in which the historical tension that has always existed between art and psychiatry is made manifest: the psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot’s famous documentary photography of Parisian mental patients, selected works from the Prinzhorn collection, the University of Heidelberg and from the Brussels-based ART EN MARGE collection, works from Adolf Wölfli, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Antonin Artaud and many other artists from the Art Brut movement.

The neurologist and physician Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) published L’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (The Photographic Collection of the Salpetrière Hospital, 1876-1877), a series of black-and-white photographs showing women in the throes of fits of hysteria. The generally accepted psychiatric image of hysteria was at that time associated with female sexuality and an aberration of the soul, associated with the powers of the devil.

The effect of Charcot’s striking images went far beyond their documentary and medical significance: Félician Rops and the artists of the Surrealist movement who found in the subconscious the source of artistic creation, and who saw in madness a metaphor for absolute freedom, were, apparently, inspired by them. In Les Jeux de la Poupée (Doll’s Games, 1949) Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) created a fetishistic doll, whose anatomy with its unforseen possibilities for dislocation typified human desire. Louise Bourgeois’ (b. 1911) famous sculpture Arch of Hysteria (1993), by showing a male body in the most-recognised poses of Charcot’s patients, critically reflected the vulnerability and strength of the women in the photographs.

In his role as a doctor at the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic, Walter Morgenthaler (1882-1952) investigated the artistic versatility of his schizophrenic patient Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930). Wölfli, who was a writer, poet, illustrator and composer, in some 45 books brought together over 25,000 handwritten pages and some 3000 drawings. Morgenthaler was convinced that Wölfli’s illness was the basis for his artistic aptitude.

Prinzhorn Collection and Art Brut - In 1919 the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933) was charged with collecting and analysing photographs of mentally ill patients. His interest lay in works of art that had an honest, spontaneous, creative origin. His 1922 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artwork of the Mentally Ill) marked a turning point in the history of ‘outsider’ art, and bestowed artistic worth on certain works by mentally ill patients. LOSS OF CONTROL contains selected works from the distinguished Prinzhorn collection.

In his search for an anti-cultural position the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) coined the term Art Brut in 1944. Dubuffet collected works from the patients of psychiatric clinics alongside those from spiritualist mediums. He investigated works by prisoners and by those cut off from society, and brought into focus the isolation and marginalization of cultural and artistic positions. In an imagined dialogue with the great Belgian symbolist Rops, the exhibition also reveals the positions of further artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Works by Jörg Immendorff, René Magritte, Bjarne Melgaard, Yue Minjun, Tracey Moffatt and Francis Picabia will be on display. On the first floor of the museum the Belgian artist Marco den Breems will present a room-filling installation, suffused with African-inspired ‘living’ magic that will undermine the pretensions of modern Western art Jan Hoet’s comprehensive farewell exhibition LOSS OF CONTROL puts the borders of art and the ‘controls’ of our prevailing society and its culture up for discussion. Starting with the taboo-breaking and decadent fantasies of Félicien Rops, the exhibition confronts us with ambivalences that are as ancient as they are modern - ambivalences between art and life, madness and clear-sightedness, death and sexuality, autistic self-relation and extrinsic constraints.

Social taboos and repressed desires that we have internalised all through our lives, return here in fears, fantasies and passions, in the shapes of hysterical bodies and dissolve the boundaries of the perceptions that hold us under control. LOSS OF CONTROL undertakes to shake up our perception of art, rather than art itself.” (Jacques Charlier)

LOSS OF CONTROL has been made possible by the prestigious loans provided by the Musée Félicien Rops in Namur, the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, from the Collection of the Musée Royal de Mariemont, Morlanwelz, the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, the Musée Villeneuve d’Ascq Collection, the ABCD Collection, Paris, the Procreart, Aarschot Collection, the Fondation Dubuffet, Paris and the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Kunstmuseum Bern as well as from many other private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in three languages with a foreword by Jan Hoet and contributions by Jacques Charlier, Véronique Carpiaux, Carine Fol, Michael Kröger, Pierre Sterckx and Detlef Petry. The catalogue is available at the museum.

The exhibition is supported by NRW Art Foundation, Province de Namur, Commissariat général aux Relations internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique (CGRI) and the Mondriaan Foundation. LOSS OF CONTROL is a joint project between Jan Hoet / Marta Herford, Véronique Carpiaux / Musée Provincial Félicien Rops, Carine Fol / ART EN MARGE, Brussels, Jacques Charlier and Marco den Breems.