Expanding Grounds.
Curated by Valérie Delfosse & Laurence Dujardyn
With Francis Alÿs, Huma Bhabha, Imi Knoebel, Steven Parrino, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, Walter Swennen, Michel Tombroff and Franz West. SYBIL is proud to present Expanding Grounds, a group exhibition co-curated with Valérie Delfosse featuring semina works from the 1990s-2000s by Francis Alÿs, Huma Bhabha, Imi Knoebel, Steven Parrino, Cindy Sherman, Fran Stella, Walter Swennen, Michel Tombroff and Franz West. The exhibition will be on view from 25 April to 24 May, 2025. Expanding Grounds brings together nine influential artists whose practices radically reconfigure the foundations of contemporary art-whether through material experimentation, spatial disruption, or the shifting ground of identity. In this exhibition, "ground" is both a physical site and a conceptual one: it represents tradition, territory, history, and form. These artists expand, rupture, and reimagine that ground-making space for contradiction, ambiguity, and transformation. Through sculpture, painting, photography, installation and sculpture, the exhibition presents a wide spectrum of approaches on the level of the (im)material, the body and the site.
Frank Stella (1936-2024, New York, US), Imi Knoebel (1940, Dessau, D), Steven Parrino (1958-2005, New York, US) and Michel Tombroff (1964, Brussels, B) challenge the picture plane and the purity of form. Their works break down painting into something sculptural, dynamic, and unstable.
Stella's formidable The Chapel (C-30, IX open) brings together lessons in painting, printmaking and sculpture, by bending, curving and deforming metal sheets onto which the artist stencils, sprays and scribbles. Part of a celebrated series made between 1986 and 1997 and titled after Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, with this work Stella captures some of the beautiful chaotic order of the book and its ideas of intangible greatness while expressing his admiration for the Abstract Expressionists. In Knoebel's Pure Freude works, created in 2001-02, each color appears monochrome on one element of the overall composition, bringing painting back to its essence of color and surface. Named after the cult record label he founded with his wife in 1979, the series is exemplary for the artist's interest in seriality, reductive color, spare geometries and the use of industrial materials. Parrino is best known for his signature "misshaped" sculptural monochromes with slashed, torn or twisted canvas. In his 1995 Misfit #4, a twisted canvas is covered with black enamel, blending an elegant formal aesthetic with an aggressive punk approach. With his Suburban Sublime series Michel Tombroff created a group of three-dimensional paintings inspired by modernist sculptor Tony Smith's 1996 Artforum interview recalling a car ride along the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. The work on view here, Turnpike VII, represents highway segments and interchanges, while inhabiting the aesthetics of 1960s monochromatic shape paintings by artists such as Frank Stella. Walter Swennen's (1946, Brussels, B) playful, language-inflected abstraction resists coherence, grounding painting in
nonsense and intuition. In Untitled (Stomp), painted by Swennen in 1991 on triplex panel, a smoking character appears underneath an abstract white plane onto which the inverted letters "STOMP" and a music stand are painted Words and images are manipulated to transform the nonsensical into an enigma. Cindy Sherman(1954, New Jersey, US) interrogates identity through a shapeshifting lens of performance, photography, and persona. In her iconic Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) series, comprised of 69 black and white photographs, the artist casts herself in various stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s films. They represent clichés or feminine types that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination.
Huma Bhabha (1962, Karachi, Pakistan) builds monstrous yet human figures from industrial detritus, speaking to violence, memory, and survival. The sculpture on view here from 2006, A.B., is a cast and painted bronze posing convincingly as a clay head on a stack of styrofoam packing.
Francis Alÿs's (1959, Antwerp, B) urban interventions and videos trace invisible borders, labor, and the poetic logic of movement. Torre 2 (1990) marks one of the artist's earliest attempts to address the overwhelming experience of Mexico City, after moving there in 1986 as an architect. Drawing upon the makeshift tortilla stands one finds throughout the city, the sculpture brings together notions of food, shelter and making a living, exploring the tension between individual agency and the notion of progress.
Franz West's (1947-2012, Vienna, AU) adaptable, tactile sculptures invite interaction, suggesting that meaning is always contingent on context and viewer. With their steel frames draped in brighly-colored straps of fabric, his Onkel-Stühle (Uncle Chairs) are among his most important works.