BRUSSELS.- WIELS is presenting the first large-scale exhibition of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’ work in Brussels, the city where she lives and works. WOR(LD)K IN PROGRESS? retraces Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s practice via new pieces and through the reactivation of earlier works and constellations.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx organizes her exhibitions in a movement of that consists of reducing to the elementary through laying bare all the conventions that accompany art: each exhibition is a specific construction, an investigation of experiments around a specific space-time: that of the architecture and the mechanics of the institution where it intervenes. Beyond a seeming abstraction, her relationship to the world is translated into works that name, describe, question: the title of the exhibition reveals an ongoing and operative idea, that of the sedimentation process of a practice, inasmuchh as it attests to her critical reflection on the notion of progress and growth in the context of an announced economic revival.

Exploring her subjects (lines, points, forms, floating figures…) as inexhaustibly new givens, multiplying the originals, and effacing the clues and bearings – gravity, weight, balance, on and off camera … – of such historically defined practices as sculpture, painting, or cinema, she makes WIELS resound with themes and notions that refuse all closure.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx traces the contours of art and catches them into the ephemeral perspective of her own process of creating. Her work shows how the time and space of painting is more complex than its frame. A clear chaos of motives and associations offers a particular space for frames, words, paper, signatures and other peripheral aspects integral to the process of creating an image. An open formalism is can be read, but the view remains succinct, it cannot be neutralised in a single point of view. In a fragile play of mere possibilities the view moves between open and closed, light and dark, false and real, kitsch and aesthetic balance.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx was born in Brussels in 1958, where she still lives. Her work has been presented internationally, including, to cite the most recent, at the Reina Sofia, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2009), MAMCO, Geneva (2007), The Drawing Center, New York (2006), The Power Plant, Toronto (2005), Ausstellungshalle Münster (2005), The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2003), South London Gallery (2002), Documenta 11, Kassel? (2002), Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2001), Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst, Ghent (1999) and Witte de With, Rotterdam (1994).

Joëlle Tuerlinckx makes sculptures, collections of objects, slides and videos that reflect combined in a singular way her personal universe, set remotely by great attention to the forms. As part of a history of minimal and conceptual art peculiar to Belgium, the apparent formal rigor of the work of Joëlle Tuerlinckx observation reveals a transient phenomena, in the lives of everyday movements such as sunlight or crossing landscapes, with the intention to capture the temporal evolution of sensible things.

She is represented by the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna and the Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne/Berlin.