Phillip van den Bossche (ed.), Jean-Pierre Criqui and Dominic van den Boogerd

Didier Vermeiren
Collection de Solides

Design: Kühle und Mozer
Illustrated (colour, b/w, duotone), bound, 128 pages, size: 24 x 30 cm
text in Dutch and English, ISBN 90-5662-337-0, € 38.50

NAi Publishers in coorperation with the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

For close on three decades the Belgian artist Didier Vermeiren (1951) has been working with tremendous resolve on a monumental body of work. Vermeiren rose to international fame in the '80s and early '90s with work that fell into two groups, the so-called pedestals and chariots. In Collection de Solides a number of these works serve as the context for a newly developed third group, the series Solides plastiques. Sculptures by Vermeiren invariably refer to others among his sculptures. The work sheds light on the different relationships between body and mass, sculpture and pedestal, form and mould, stasis and motion, a sculpture's position in space and its relation to the spectator.

Remarkably, this is the first publication on Vermeiren's work to include colour illustrations; in all previous publications he has only permitted black-and-white photography. Since 1977 the artist has been photographing and documenting his sculptures himself. The photographs seem like works in their own right but at the same time they have much to say about the various stages of production, the work in the studio and the work in the galleries.

Collection de Solides includes two essays that describe and analyse Vermeiren's work. That by Dominic van den Boogerd, director of De Ateliers in Amsterdam, enters into the current significance of Vermeiren's oeuvre for sculpture and photography. The critic Jean-Pierre Criqui, one of this year's commissioners for the French Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale, goes on to place the new series of sculptures in the wider context of the artist's corpus of works.

Exhibition: 13 September - 9 November 2003 in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven