Zeger Reyers
Zeger Reyers (1966) is known for his installations in which he confronts the artificial, man-made world with nature. For instance, he made fungi grow from furniture and sank chairs down into the river Oosterschelde until they were overgrown with mussels. In the work Drum Kit (2004) he coupled up a hundred empty oil drums and placed them in the sea. The tangle of oil drums thus became an instrument played on by the sea, producing muffled, banging sounds. At the same time it showed the enormous power of the sea: after seven weeks the drums had been dented and rusted almost beyond recognition.
It is not Zeger Reyers's aim to pass moral judgement on e.g. the harmful influence of man on the environment. In his installations he makes the marvels and strength of nature visible in an intensified way; at the same time the visitor becomes strongly aware of the vulnerability of the man-made environment. Characteristic is Zeger Reyers's intelligent and resourceful use of material, taking you by surprise and making you aware of the relativity of our certainties. He surprises the visitor and forces him to think, to reassess, while at the same time giving him the possibility to look at things once again with an open mind.
A good example is his installation Aqua Boogie I (2004), for which he had the basement of the GEM (Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague) flooded and set out black leather carps in the water. Also well-known are his works with MOSA porcelain which he first used in Good Intentions (1999): a long table overloaded with porcelain plates, cups and saucers, which was shown on the 8th Biennale of Havana in 2003. This work is followed up by Hard Water (2004), where the porcelain plates are piled up like a cascade from floor to ceiling. In 2007 Zeger Reyers received the Ouborg Award for his oeuvre.
One of his latest projects is Rotating Kitchen, commissioned for the exhibition Eating the Universe, which is dedicated to food in art, taking Daniel Spoerri's table pieces (Tableaux- pièges) as a starting point. It consists of a life size fully equipped kitchen in which a cook first prepares food, after leaving the kitchen it slowly starts rotating around its own axis thus tossing and turning all the pots, pans and food in it. The work was premiered at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2009 and is now on show in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart till January 9th. A video was made from the premiere in Düsseldorf, titled Rotating Kitchen in an edition of 7.
At the moment the installation Pavillion is exhibited in the Renaat Braempavillion in the Middelheimmuseum in Antwerpen, Belgium. In the pavillion with its typical organic and flowing forms Zeger Reyers has built a sloping floor which was covered with earth which contains spores of mushrooms. After a lingering start because of problems and temperature and humidity, the mushrooms have started to grow as white beads on a pitch black background www.middelheimmuseum.be/
Rotating Kitchen edit from Zeger Reyers on Vimeo.