Catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition De Storm at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp.

“De Storm” (The Storm, in Flemish), was the most important solo museum show by Johan Creten in his native Belgium. The sculpture park Middelheim is known for his collection that ranges from Rodin and Henry Moore to Frans West.

The show got an amazing 45.000 visitors. This book is the first in a series made with the designer Anton de Haan and Catapult, that includes “The Nature of Clay”, “Strange Fruit” and “Alfred Paintings”.

“Creten builds his exhibition from diverse and heterogeneous groups of sculptures, making very purposive play with the various possibilities the Middelheim Museum Hortiflora garden offers and each time giving the metaphor of the storm a different twist in dialogue with the openness or enclosure of the landscape. Thus he creates a tension between our sometimes laborious individual developments, from the turbulence between two individuals to the heavy weather within our European socio-political history and global society. The works themselves evince a stormy relationship between concept and form and are fraught with art-historical references and ironic (self-)criticism. Creten offers many ways of reading and glossing the story of man — alone or in a group. But he purposely chooses a non-pamphleteering iconography for a complex, pithy yet volatile compilation of suggested interpretations. The viewer has to do the work; he may see his preconceptions confirmed or take on the challenge of a new view. But one thing is made crystal clear in the Middelheim Museum gardens, we ourselves are the real wilderness.”

• TEXTS
  Philip Heylen, Vice-Mayor for Culture, City of Antwerp
  Sara Weyns, Curator
  Mara Hoberman, Writer
  Translation: Lee Preedy, Jos Van Gorp
  Language: English / Flemish

• FORMAT
  18 x 25 cm

  French format
  128 pages
  Hardcover

• PRINT
  New Goff, Belgium

• COPIES
  1st printed edition of 2.000 copies

• ISBN 978-9-081-185-370

• Published by
  Middelheimmuseum