Past: Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys

"Against Venetian statuary, against marble gods with triforks - de Gruyter and Thys is wantonly provincial, the unsophisticate, the stupid it is: turns out, despite centuries of looking up at them, we don't actually resemble Greek Gods. "

"The groaning idiocy of the fringes, the plains of simpletons, us, you slurring, drooling everyone, the world, these things contained by the artworld's cranially polished, symbolically medalled, forced to consider farts."

"Painful, developmentally delayed style, filled with speech impediments, slow progress, and language drifting into nonsense, is, like von Trier's early film, an idiocy against social decorum, our socially vulnerable conversations, socially conscious films, replayed by the slow and impaired"

"They're funny, but they don't feel good to laugh at, no matter how stupid they are, they still reflect us. The doofus in film is guaranteed redemption by the contrivances of plot and will win out in the end. These characters get none."


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(Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys)
Venice 2019, Belgium Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Mondo Cane, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Kunsthal Aarhus, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys at KIN & Gladstone Gallery