Due to works taking place in the museum galleries, the Mee-maak-kamer and the presentation of M-resident Elise El Yousfi will be inaccessible to wheelchair users from 26 October to 19 November. They will be accessible to everyone again from 20 November.
In his practice, Ricardo Brey often takes an everyday object, a fragment of nature, or a material that carries a history within it as his starting point. This can evolve into a drawing, a sculpture, an assemblage, or an installation. Through his attentive engagement with whatever presents itself, his work also touches on fundamental questions about origin, humanity, and our place in the world.
Ricardo Brey (born 1955, Havana; lives and works in Ghent since 1990) has developed a multifaceted practice over several decades that unites various media. In Cuba, he studied at San Alejandro and Escuela Nacional de Arte, the art academies of Havana, and was a member of Volumen I, an influential avant-garde group that helped shape a new generation of Cuban artists in the early 1980s. His participation in Documenta IX in 1992 marked his move to Europe. Since then, he has established an international career, participating in the São Paulo and Venice Biennale and exhibiting at venues including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, El Museo del Barrio in New York and Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen, and closer to home, S.M.A.K., M HKA, and Museum Hof van Busleyden.
Brey’s work frequently references discovery, collecting, and classification. His installations and assemblages are reminiscent of archives, travelogues, and scientific collections. Yet they do not simply reinforce the idea that the world can be organised or comprehended. From a decolonial perspective, Brey explores how processes like colonisation have named, appropriated, and displaced plants, animals, objects, and cultures throughout history. His visual language intertwines Afro-Cuban syncretism and creolisation, blending influences from Caribbean, African, and European cultures.
M has invited Ricardo Brey to present a solo exhibition focusing on the continuity within his oeuvre. In Motion brings together fifty years of work, from his earliest period in Cuba to his latest creations. In so doing, it follows the logic of Brey’s work: it is not chronological, but rhizomatic, like a network that branches out and expands. Early and recent works enter into dialogue with one another at M, thereby adding new layers of meaning to Brey’s recurring focus on found objects, fragments of the natural world, and systems of classification.
Walking through the exhibition is to embark on a journey of discovery, much as Brey himself continually does with the things he collects, preserves, and creates.
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