The Roger Raveel Museum brings together works by Jan Vercruysse (1948-2018), Nel Aerts (1987) and John Murphy (1945). The title of the exhibition, Unreadiness, is taken from Giacomo Joyce, a sixteen-page text written by James Joyce during his stay in Trieste in 1914 and published posthumously in 1968.[1] In this love story, Joyce expresses feelings of loneliness, loss and desire. The text forms a tangle of references hidden behind a veil of personal connotations and universal archetypes...."
"The general mood in many of the works is that of melancholy, an undefinable sense of loss and longing. Like a ship floating off course on an open sea, the artist feels stricken by loneliness and seeks to express this existential dread through a doppelganger, a character based on themselves. Watching and being watched go hand in hand. The works in this exhibition seem to exist in another, self-enclosed dimension, at a remove from the viewer..."
"Unreadiness connects works by artists from two different generations and artworks from different periods, ranging from the early 1980 to 2022. The underlying question about the status and place of art today is more topical than ever. The exhibition attempts to provide an answer to a world that is both unsated and insatiable. Turned in on themselves like hermetic machines, the artworks invite the visitor to come closer and become acquainted with their strange forms, their images whose tranquil beauty – sometimes absurd but always sincere – has the power to touch and move us."
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