Arthur Cordier (1993, Belgium) worked in an advertising agency, but he hates advertising. From the experience remained a constant interest in the study of urban and commercial trickery – also known in French as roublardise. To reveal the economical construct of urban contexts, he uses the effectiveness of commercial strategies against itself in a tautological and often parasitic manner. To a further extent he tackles the aesthetics of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, and efficiency through relational, situational, and contextually-specific works, self-reflecting upon the economy of artistic practice in a production-driven society.
LANDSCAPE
Since 2021, he has pursued a series of landscape paintings using heavy-duty truck tarpaulin and adhesive vinyl as a contemporary reflection on advertising, highways, in other words, landscape. His work contains oppositions of growth and death, birth and expiration, creation and consumption. The plant patterns visible in the paintings are vectorized representations of advertising office plants, which he documented in his previous project titled ‘Kunst_planten’. In Dutch, “kunst” is, of course, translated as art, but also as artificial or synthetic. All plants were borrowed for the duration of the exhibition from advertising offices in Belgium and the Netherlands – which was previously shown at Hgtomi Rosa in The Hague and IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen, Belgium. The Mondriaan Fonds has granted him with Kunstenaar Start the past year, allowing him to exhibit new works during Prospects at Art Rotterdam in 2024. Additionally, his work was recently shown at Galerie Maurits van de Laar and HEDEN Gallery, both in The Hague, as well as TORCH Gallery in Amsterdam. Alongside his artistic practice, he is a co-founder of the artist initiative and project space The Balcony. Arthur work is part of the public collection of IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, and private collections in Belgium and The Netherlands.
Currently Arthur is doing a residency at Biennale de l’Image Possible in Liège. Also he will be part of a new exhibition at Museum Leuven, opening June 29th.
