PIETER VERMEERSCH CURATED BY TREVOR SMITH FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 31, 2009 OPENING RECEPTION FEBRUARY25, 2009 6-8PM

Over the last few years, Pieter Vermeersch has been building a critical reputation in Europe for his artwork that embeds a deep interest in modernist monochromatic painting inside a repres-entational project, concerned with the organization and depiction of the effects of light in space.

Always working site-specificially, Vermeersch nonetheless is influenced by and will use moveable supports such as painting on canvas or photography. Most often, he will paint directly on the walls, doors or windows of a given space, seeking to bring the viewer or passer-by into a closer engagement with their environment. The idealist rhetorics of painting is challenged and distilled in the social and interpersonal dynamics of a given situation.

At White Box, Vermeersch’s minimal presentation will begin by removing all temporary walls and furniture, stripping the space back to a progression of simple volumetric spaces or boxes. This simple architectural condition is the starting point for Vermeersch’s large scale wall paintings that slowly graduate from pure gallery white through to deeply saturated color. This graduated surface redefines the way the space is perceived, but also reminds viewers of the grey scale familiar from photographic and printing processes, as if they too have been merged into a kind of representation.

Pieter Vermeersch was born in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1973. He lives and works in Brussels. A laureate of the HISK, Antwerp in 1999-2001, he has produced site-specific installations at SMAK, Ghent; MuHKa, Antwerp; ProgrammArtCenter, Mexico City; Projecte SD, Barcelona; BOZAR, Brussels; and many others. His work was featured in “Expanded Painting” Prague Biennial 2 2005 and the first Brussels Biennial 2008. This is his first exhibition in the United States.

This exhibition has been supported by: BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts Brussels; Flemish Community (Arts and Culture); and Koraalberg Gallery (www.koraalberg.com). Trevor Smith is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.