B. Wurtz
”You Know, This Is How He Is”
Exhibition dates: 21 April — 3 June, 2023
Office Baroque, Antwerp
Office Baroque is pleased to announce the second individual exhibition of New York based artist B. Wurtz. at our gallery on Everdijstraat 30 in Antwerp.
The exhibition will consist of 32 works. All are reproduced in the artist publication B. Wurtz, You Know, This Is How He Is, Tutto Inc. Australia, 2023
“I was delighted to be approached by Tutto, a publisher of artists’ books. Matlok Griffiths asked me if I would like to do a project with them. He said that one idea he had been thinking about was to send an artist a book with blank pages. The artist could then fill in the pages with whatever they wanted. Since I had no book ideas in the back of my mind that I was wanting to do at that moment, I thought it sounded great. We agreed to proceed with that plan. I then received in the mail the blank book “dummy”, coming from Australia, where Tutto is located. Then the question for me was what did I want to put in the book?
I decided to just cut out pieces of my own paper the same size as the book pages, and then work on those. It seemed simpler. My thought was that then those works could be scanned and the book could be printed using those scans. The order of the pages could be determined later. I sat with all this for quite a while wondering what came next. Then I decided that rather than overthink what to do, I would just start making works with the type of ordinary overlooked found objects from daily life that appear in a lot of my artworks. I collaged various items to the paper and added acrylic paint. Some of the collage elements were parts of supermarket flyers, package wrappers, grocery lists and saved notes I had made.
The things that led to the book’s title (“You know, this is how he is.”) were snippets of conversations that I have heard over the years on the streets of New York City. I remembered them and would jot them down (in quotation marks) on small pieces of paper when I got home. Three of those were used in the book.
While having a Zoom meeting with Wim and Marie from Office Baroque, we were talking about the book. They wondered about the original artworks that had been used to make the scans. Since we had indeed decided to print the book from the scans, I had just collected the preliminary artworks together and was planning to add them to my archives. Wim and Marie suggested exhibiting them at their gallery. I thought it sounded like a wonderful idea.”
B. Wurtz
New York City
2023
