Research in Residence #3: Stefaan Vervoort

This exhibition, the third in CIVA’s Research in Residence programme, gauges the engagements with architecture, design, and the city of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976) between roughly 1957 and 1967. During this decade, Broodthaers took up journalism and photography, made his first artworks, and established the key orientations for his emerging practice as an artist and writer.

The exhibition pivots around Monument Public nº 4 (1963), Broodthaers’ earliest exhibited artwork. This exhibition attempts to contextualise this seminal early work, examining its formal and referential proximity to the urban and architectural frameworks of postwar Brussels. Whereas Broodthaers’ burgeoning art practice is typically codified as a transfer from poetry to art-making, The Architect is Absent speculates instead of the assemblage’s close relation to architecture, design, and the city.

Using articles, photographs, documents, and publications from CIVA’s collections and others, it explores Broodthaers’ critique of modern architecture, industrial design, and built heritage, notably in his collaborations with architect Constantin Brodzki (1924–2021), artist-designer Corneille Hannoset (1926–1997), and poet, architect, and critic Pierre Puttemans (1933–2013).

Broodthaers pictured cities and buildings, published in an architectural journal, and worked with architects and designers; yet he opposed the artist’s freedom and capacity to critique society to the architect’s obligation to ‘make things work’ and to serve society all the same. “L’architecte est absent,” [the architect is absent] a quip Broodthaers used in his art circa 1967, is evocative of this contrast. The phrase hints at an architect, real or imagined, whose absence inscribes the artwork with poetry, authenticity, and legitimacy.