We are pleased to present Les Salons Paléolithiques, Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s third solo exhibition in the gallery’s main rooms.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx works with materials that have the status of archival objects. She combines drawings, found objects, pieces of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, and films into collage-like, sculptural arrangements. Tuerlinckx’s works are variable and fixed only for the moment. They are subject to an ongoing process of references, re-appropriations, and re-adaptations. That the situation in an artist’s studio is fundamentally different from – even antagonistic to – the situation in a gallery or museum, where materials are exhibited, plays a decisive role for Tuerlinckx. In order to do this justice, Tuerlinckx transfers architectural references to her studio into the exhibition setting in the form of brick walls or color samples on studio walls.

The starting point for her exhibition Les Salons Paléolithiques is the negative print of a hand from a cave painting in Pech Merle in the southwest of France, of which there is a copy in Tuerlinckx’s personal archive. On the one hand, this “Paleolithic hand,” which was created roughly 15,000 years BCE, establishes Tuerlinckx’s mental timeline and resonates with archaic elements and the importance of the hand and handiwork. Within this timeline, the archive materials – which are updated in the exhibition context – gain the status of something prehistoric, and sculptures are transformed into pre-sculptures.

Tuerlinckx uses the motif of the branch, which refers to the idea of a family tree or an evolutionary diagram, to point at a possible system of order for her archival materials. But in place of the model of a tree with humans as the highest beings in creation at the top, we rather have the coral model developed by Charles Darwin to describe his theory of evolution. According to this theory, evolution progresses in a rampant, non-hierarchical manner, forming connections and leaving loose ends open. This system also encompasses historically extinct species. Tuerlinckx’s system is similar to this coral model. She is an archivist with an astonishing poetic power of association that reactivates – as is often the case in dreams – forgotten and discarded objects and in this way restores the equilibrium of the value of things

Joëlle Tuerlinckx was born in 1958 in Brussels, Belgium, and lives and works in Brussels. Joëlle Tuerlinckx participated in Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 2014; Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2003; and documenta 11 in Kassel,Germany, in 2002. A solo exhibition of her work will be shown at the Beacon – Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2018.

Selected solo exhibitions: Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2016); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol,United Kingdom (2013); Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium (2012); Reina Sofia, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid,Spain (2009); the Drawing Center, New York City, New York (2006); MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland (2004); TheRenaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (2003); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2001); and Witte de With,Rotterdam, Netherlands (1994).

Selected museum collections: Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; FNAC Paris; Generali Foundation/Museum der Moderne,Salzburg; MoMA, New York City; Reina Sofia, Madrid; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and The RenaissanceSociety, Chicago.