Walter Swennen: Project Walter Swennen

In parallel to his forthcoming solo exhibition ‘bewtie’ at New York’s Gladstone Gallery (September 15 – October 28), White Columns is proud to present in our Project space, a discrete display of earlier works by the celebrated Belgian artist Walter Swennen (b. 1946) alongside a film made by Jacques Charlier, that features Swennen as a narrator, with contributions from his fellow Belgian artists Guy Mees, Leo Josefstein, Bernd Lohaus and Panamarenko, that was originally shown in the Paris Biennial in 1971. The display features two key early works by Swennen, his 1968 portrait of the writer William Burroughs, made when Swennen was in his early 20s, and Zeven Flessen, a painted sculptural work from 1966 that reverberates with the contemporaneous work of his compatriot Marcel Broodthaers. A third work, I am Afraid I told a Lie, is a folded map-like print from 2011, that charts a constellation of artists and philosophers, whose work and thinking have likely helped shape and inform Swennen’s own.

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