The Sculpture Trail benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil
Entangled, 2024 Aluminium cast, 71 x 70 x 38 cm
Presented by Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery - B07
Location
Banque de Luxembourg
14a, bd Royal, L-2949 Luxembourg
Art Walk Challenge
With the kind support of Banque de Luxembourg
The work Entangled evokes humankind and its direct relationship with the earth. The sculpture depicts a foot intertwined with plants and insects. For us, the foot symbolizes the presence and imprint of humanity in this world. As a fragment, the foot refers back to the sculptures of antiquity. Considered an ideal of beauty in ancient times and emphasized in Greek and Roman statuary as an essential part, this fragment is often the only element that has survived through the ages and reached our contemporary era. In this way, the work alludes to Antiquity, where the fragment alone becomes a sculpture that shapes our perception. It symbolizes humanity across centuries – humanity in its entirety. This fragment, no longer carrying a body, becomes both a metaphor for humankind’s presence in the world and a symbol of its vulnerability. Conceived as a piece of anatomy embraced and entangled by nature, it embodies the rupture within contemporary thought about humankind’s place in relation to nature.
The work stages the relationship – or the struggle – between the biological and the mineral quality of sculpture, between nature and humanity. It stems from a vision of a new era in which humankind and nature might reconcile and live in relative harmony, where natural elements are no longer seen only as unruly, dangerous, or malevolent. The combination of images – a fragment such as the foot and the surrounding plants – suggests the idea of a hybridization in which the vegetal and the human coexist and influence one another. Sculpture, which in the artistic tradition has long served as a symbol of major shifts in thought, is here inspired by the new dynamics of the modern age, in which humankind’s place within its environment is profoundly questioned. The monumental base on which our civilization rests – grounded since the industrial era in an increasingly heavy imprint of our activities upon nature – is, perhaps, itself to be reconsidered. For after all, it is an imprint, and the foot is one of the oldest forms of imprint left by humankind since its very beginnings.
Feipel Bechameil. Martine Feipel (b.1975, Luxembourg) & Jean Bechameil (b. 1964, Paris, France) live and work in Brussels. Since 2008, they have developed an artistic body of work that reflects on modernity and how, through industry, technology, architecture and its ideologies, it has transformed our relationship to the world, to space, to time and to each other. Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil create installations that combine illusion, the imaginary, the unstable and the illogical, within the gridded, controlled spaces of the contemporary world. Sculptors as well as amateur researchers and engineers, with a keen sense of the world's theatricality and beauty, they create works with a socio-historical, aesthetic, political and technical approach. Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil combine their many skills in a variety of fields - drawing, sculpture, engineering, staging, sound - to produce work that is as formally accomplished as it is strongly committed. Hackers of robotics, the artists reappropriate the fields oftechnology in a sensitive way through an eminently political gesture: seizing the know-how of industrial robotics to apply it to the creation of artworks that tell a different story of our world.
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