Godelieve Vandamme / Installations / Known as the shelter

Known as the shelter

Exhibition The Right To Be Human, MOMus Contemporain, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2017.
25 pieces of white lacquered steel on grey wall paint, 70 × 100 cm.
3 pieces of white lacquered steel on grey wall paint, 40 × 70 cm.

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Exhibition Paysages de Belgique (Landscapes of Belgium), Musée d'Ixelles, Brussels, 2015.
42-piece white lacquered steel wall installation, total size 100 × 150 cm.

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Exhibition Known as the shelter, Rossicontemporary, Brussels, 2012.
Painted steel cut-outs on a coloured background, variable dimensions.

“... The motif of the shelter is undoubtedly what weaves a link between the two aspects of this dialectic by which the representation of the landscape is reconfigured, from the 1960s onwards, between a romantic fusion with nature and the observation of the changes made by man to his environment. A number of contemporary artists, including the German artist Nils-Udo, the Englishman Chris Drury and the Italian Mario Merz, have devoted their work to the singular object of the shelter. In their own way, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who retired to a mountain hut in Norway (Skojollden), and the architect Le Corbusier, who lived out his last days in a waterside shelter (Roquebrunne), bear witness, through their biographies, to the fact that the hut is an object of thought, of life and therefore of representation.

“This object encapsulates multiple meanings, ranging from the myth of the origin of civilisation to the pantheistic celebration of nature. The shelter evokes man's original state and the temporary structures he placed in his natural environment. In this sense, the hut is an archetypal place. It revives memories of primitive occupation of the landscape. So it's hardly surprising that it has become an object of speculation in the field of art. Jean Marie Mahieu has dedicated his Umbracolo series to it since 2010, showing the spontaneous changes that metamorphose the visual appearance of a shelter at the foot of a slag heap. In Godelieve Vandamme's Known as the shelter (2012), a hut, always the same but captured from different angles, is reduced to a stylised, flat form cut from metal, forming the basic vocabulary of a visual style echoing that developed by Dotremont as he flew over the snowy plains of Lapland...”