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Exhibitions — Mixed Media, Installation

Recente Sorry’s | Guillaume Bijl

Date:
22 May up to 12 July 2025
Location:
→ Lumen Travo Gallery
Lijnbaansgracht 314
1017 WZ Amsterdam
Open:
  • Thursday 13:00—18:00
  • Friday 13:00—18:00
  • Saturday 13:00—18:00
Admission
Free admission
Festive Gallery Night

Belgian surrealist Guillaume Bijl returns to Lumen Travo Gallery for a special solo exhibition, Recente Sorry’s, during the Amsterdam Art Week 2025. The exhibition will have its opening on Thursday 22 May between 17:00 and 21:00, during Festive Gallery Night!

Guillaume Bijl (1946, Antwerp) is known for his large-scale installations and visual realism. Since the late 70s, Bijl created realistic decors using found objects. In doing this, he had a pioneering role in the resurgence of the ready-made. Bijl shows the audience various aspects of our western ‘civilisation’ and consumer society. Using extreme stereotypes, he creates a sort of ‘archeology of our time’ in a tragi-comedic, alienating way.

His “Recente Sorry’s” presented at Lumen Travo can take on different forms. They are compositions of objects or installations with an absurd element to them, making them fall out of reality, into the surreal. 

“The word ‘sorry’ is a prototypical, cool word of this age. When, in 1987, I started compiling a number of absurd assemblages of existing objects, and thus made an abstraction, I was ‘being unfaithful’ to my own realistic form. As a result, I called those little works ‘sorries’.

Later on, I also made a number of larger, absurd installations, in which I consistently insinuated the human figure in a surreal tableau. Those works became an absurd poetic extension of my oevre.” 

– Guillaume Bijl, 1991

Make sure to visit the gallery and admire Guillaume’s inspiring works!