Born in 1971 in Mortsel, Belgium
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
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When Monique De Ridder decided to focus on painting, dropping her activity as a costume and set designer, she radically turned away from theatrical abundance into the silence and slow temporality which pictures in a painterly tradition may have.
Even if her works base themselves on images and deal with those – taking them apart and reconstructing them otherwise – the resulting presence is first and foremost pictorial.
As such it can be seen as part of a radicalisation of a moment in the development of painting in Belgium with its problematisation of the tension between the act of painting and the proposal of content. Monique De Ridder focuses again on the fact of a painting as an appearance, rather than a presence.
Her starting point are images. These are dealt with in a prolongation of a modernist tradition, undoing them of their anecdotes, of the details that ornament them and might turn them into a narration. The images are ‘purified’ and thus opened. This first move can be seen as a choice to continue a modernist approach. What makes the paintings contemporary, is that they consequently go beyond scarceness and a finality as a statement.
These ‘logics’ are avoided; the path that is followed after this initial move is one that leads back to experience. There is no overriding guiding element, neither the origin of the images, nor their subject matter or their initial aesthetical force de frappe. They start as found materials, snap shots or secondary images in magazines. The initial offer they seem to have given to the artist, is a space for ordinary but intense experience, of a joy of sensuous awareness. It are these unaggressive, unstated qualities which are subsequently highlighted, which re-emerge as a pictorial field. This field is spatial, for certain, but it is the kind of space that starts from a bodily relation and that suggests a dynamics between limits and encounter. It is coloristic, in such a way that the radiation - of green and blues - and the subdued – even the empty canvas – complement one another. It is shapes with their own logic, logics which links up with their environment. It is composition, in its full sense: painterly language that makes sense, painterly clarity.
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She studied on the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (B), Master of Visual Arts -Theater Costume Design and followed a Postgraduate Scenography at De Singel in Antwerp (B). She was selected for the Socrates Programme -University of Hildesheim (D)-Dartington College of Arts (UK)
Exhibitions
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Art Brussels, Jacob Karpio Gallery 2006
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'Back To The Picture' Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, Curator Thibaut Verhoeven (SMAK Ghent), 2005
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'Extra Muros' Cultural Center of Strombeek-Bever (B), together with Michel François and Richard Venlet, Curator Luk Lambrecht, 2005
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'Golfo Prize 2004' European Biennale of Visual Arts La Spezia, Italy. Selected by Bart De Baere, Muhka-Antwerp. A Jury composed by Bruno Corà, Jannis Kounellis, Urs Raussmüller, Marco Vallora, Gianfranco Benedetti, Luciano Fabro. She received the second prize.
'14th prize for painting Boechout (B)' Composition of the jury: Carl Depauw (Rubenshuis, Antwerp), Stella Lohaus, Patricia Peeters, Sam Dillemans and François Blommaerts, 2004
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Selected for participation in the 'Mathilde Holait-Dapsens Prize', Antwerp, 2001
Theater Productions
Scenography for Jan Fabre/Troubleyn, “Parrots and Guineapigs”, 2002
Costumes for Het Toneelhuis-Zuidelijk Toneel-Hollandia (NL), “Leenane Trilogy” directed by Johan Simons (Selected for the theater festival), 2000-2001
Costumes for the theater company De Tijd (B), “Bal van de Pompiers” directed by Johan Van Assche and Lucas Van der Vorst, 2000-2001