Camiel Van Breedam

A living legend, Camiel is instantly recognizable on the streets of Antwerp. For almost 50 years, he has been wandering around dressed entirely in red. As a walking assemblage of various fabrics, leather, skin, and hair—monochromatic from head to toe—this artist embodies his own oeuvre: an impressive body of visual art spanning roughly seven decades and still growing daily. 

This retrospective feature work from across each of these decades, in many forms and formats. Large-scale environments are aligned with intimate collage booklets. A rich collection of assemblages, objects, and constructions in this exhibition points not only to enormous versatility but, above all, to the impossibility of not creating. 

Camiel is a master at creating something out of nothing. Old, time-worn materials of all kinds—wood, fabrics, metals—live on in art and in the socially engaged narratives told by the newly assembled artworks. He reflects on social issues from the human and artistic past, on injustice and inequality, on the craftsman and the artist, on the brickmaker and Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, Chaïm Soutine, Georges Vantongerloo, or the Bauhaus. 

Delve deeply into the ideas and body of work of an artist who hovers between the modern and the contemporary.