Pieter Engels | Fabulous Oldest Hits

About

In line with the contesting, anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s, he made conceptual work in which he ironically punctured the seriousness of the art world. He questioned the value of art, the commercialisation of the art world and the genius of the artist. In 1963, for instance, he quit painting (temporarily) to found EPO (English Products Organisation) a year later, the first of his many businesses, positioning himself no longer as an artist but as an entrepreneur.

As his alter ego, marketing director Simon Es, he issued beautiful posters and brochures to market his products and services. He sold pieces of furniture that he first broke himself and then reassembled, offered bottles of exhaled air, cut through banknotes for a fee and scratched cars (Engels damages your car nicely for f 100). His actions, which he himself called 'Wonder events', were bathed in the atmosphere of Fluxus, the art movement that sought to close the gap between art and life, through their contrarian humour.

In 1967, Engels founded a new company, ENIO (Engels New Internment Organisation), which followed developments in the funeral industry. For instance, he made coffins for a variety of sometimes bizarre objects, such as a bag of drowned water, and devised several suicide machines.

In 1971, he started working on a series of works for Strike Project, for which he temporarily ceased his activities as an artist. He proposed to the then culture minister that in exchange for 25 million guilders, he would not make any more works until his death. However, the minister did not accept his proposal. Because of his critical attitude towards the art world, his work cannot be separated from the zeitgeist in which it was created and from contemporaries such as Piero Manzoni, Lee Lozano, Marcel Broodthaers, Wim T. Schippers and Ger van Elk.

The exhibition is complemented by a room with works by Dutch conceptual artists, such as stanley brouwn, Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk, from S.M.A.K's collection.

The expo is the result of a donation from EPO, in the name of Annemarie Engels, the artist's widow. S.M.A.K. has the largest museum collection of contemporary art in Belgium and is therefore committed to a dynamic recruitment policy of which donations are a more important pillar.