Marthe Wéry, Tour & Taxis

Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Tour & Taxis with works from the estate of Belgian artist Marthe Wéry (1930-2005). It opens Saturday April 7 and will run until May 19. Wéry had an exhibition at Slewe Gallery fifteen years ago in the winter of 2003-2004, a year before she passed away. In this exhibition she will be commemorated with an installation of her famous floor works, she created for Tour et Taxis, an industrial restored building in Brussels in 2001.

Marthe Wéry is one of the most famous Belgian women artists of her generation. She got known with her poetic installations of monochrome coloured panels. When installed in a space, these paintings form together a new composition and get into a dialogue with the surrounding architecture. Though she is often categorized as an analytical painter, typical for her generation, it appears in her writing she felt more related to the spirituality of the Polish Constructivist Strzeminski or Barnett Newman.

Wéry lived and worked her whole life in Brussels. She studied at the Grande Chaumière in Paris. Her artistic career started when she took part in the famous Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975, exhibited at dokumenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 and represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1982. In 1982 she had a solo exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague. In 2011 the Gemeentemuseum organized an overview of her work, entitled The Power of Simplicity and recently, the museum exhibited an overview of her works on paper. In 2001 she had a solo exhibition at Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and in 2004 she installed an impressive solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts of Tournai (BE), including a catalogue Les couleurs du monochrome. Last year a retrospective of her work was on view at BPS22 in Charleroi (BE). Her work has been collected internationally by several private and public institutions, such as the Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Gemeentemuseum The Hague and Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.