Koenraad Dedobbeleer

Plastik: Gallery of Material Culture

“Boredom won’t starve as long as I feed it”: Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s exhibition of sculptures and artistic interventions in the Esters Villa in Krefeld, designed by none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is rather perfidious. Interacting with the architecture, the works give rise to a complicated, multi-layered referential system. The objects that the artist (born 1975 in Halle, Belgium) has created seem somehow familiar, yet at the same time always appear seeking to be something different. They are riddled with subtle allusions, ironic commentaries, and art-historical references. Dedobbeleer changes the structure of everyday objects, their dimensions, materiality or colors – often by means of only minimal interventions – and thus extracts them from their original functional context. He does this in order to put their visual and cultural qualities to the test in the world of art. Not least his exhibition titles reflect this idiosyncratic sculptural approach, which draws on the lineage of sculpture, design and everyday culture.