Jean-Marie Bytebier ( Deinze 1963 )

Jean-Marie Bytebier graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent in 1988. Together with artists such as Wim Delvoye (Belgian, b. 1965) he focuses mainly on the possibilities of how painting could be presented in order to understand our increasingly complicated postmodern society. In doing so he wants to seal the gap with conceptual art, as opposed to a previous generation of contemporary artists in Belgium, which followed the new German painting. Bytebier places the paintings in diptychs, triptychs and quadriptychs. Bringing together various small paintings influencing one another was one of his first steps to question the complete painting. There was no univocal answer, but different possibilities. The museum of Jean-Marie Bytebier is a perfect copy of the central room in the exhibition Verleden Continuous in Mechelen (2012). “I made this work as an introduction to and a statement on the gallery exhibition 'A Second Opinion'(2013) that was taking place one year later. The focus in the latter was shifted towards 'original' and 'originality'. The concept of 'originality' narrows our freedom of thinking, time and research. The word 'first' outshines the words 'second' and 'third', although these words mark progress and research. 'A Second Opinion' does not lock the time, but liberates it.”

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