Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Galerie Barbara Thumm is pleased to present the exhibition, titled Dudoute_toaster_absolu (AMVK 1981-2025), a retrospective of Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven’s extensive career. Spanning works from her early pieces in 1981 to her most recent creations from the past year, the show provides a comprehensive overview of her artistic journey.

The selection of works draws inspiration from a video titled A-X+B=12, created by Van Kerckhoven during the pandemic, for which she compiled some of her most notable pieces and brought them to life through animation. The selection is deliberately paradoxical—both random and intentional—serving as a metaphor for the eternal return and the cyclical nature of life.

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, born in 1951 in Antwerp, Belgium, lives and works in Antwerp. She studied graphic design at the Fine Arts Academy in Antwerp and has been prolific since 1974 in her output of drawings and other works on paper and synthetic material, as well as short videos. A straightforward feminist tone pervades in all her works, in which the erotic meets machine-fetishism. Interior, if not domestic spaces often serve as settings for her drawings and collages, from which dream-like futuristic enactments between human and machine-like forms unfold. In the nineties, handmade paper works gave way to computer graphics, while text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven's proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics. Music plays an important role in Van Kerckhoven's creative production in parallel to her visual output, and she and Danny Devos have stood as a key pair of the Antwerp experimental music scene under the band name Club Moral (1981–now). Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, also known as AMVK, is an artist of singular complexity. She has always been a pioneer—a female, collaborative, cerebral forerunner in a male-dominated, sales-oriented, visibility-crazed art world—and should therefore be considered an artist for the future. AMVK's practice is truly interdisciplinary. Her first arena was drawing and graphic design, but she also soon made herself at home in installation and performance art, painting, filmmaking, music and writing. She has collaborated with cutting-edge computing experts for more than 40 years. In 1981, she and artist Danny Devos founded the noise band Club Moral, which has been performing in different forms on a regular basis ever since. Under the same title, the pair organised numerous events in Antwerp until 1993 and published the magazine Force Mental since 1982. Such collaborations aside, self-analysis and self-articulation are fundamental to AMVK's work. Her creative commitment to artificial intelligence and other contemporary manifestations of mysticism cannot be disentangled from her social thought and political engagement. More often than not, her works are constellations of imagery and text. To make them she uses the toolkit of commercial graphics: Plexiglas, silkscreen paint, professional-grade printing. To contemplate the entire work of AMVK is to enter an idiosyncratic world, littered with fragments and sketchy representations from the arts, is to be confronted with abstractions, clusters of ideas and quotations ranging from occult philosophies to advanced sciences and technological concepts. An extremely ambitious project is taking shape, one that is not satisfied with a sensitive, aesthetic representation of the world, but has set itself the task of confronting the limits of the logical and the transparent of the rational with the obscure, its unthinkable, normative opposite. A dialectic project, therefore, that cannot easily be described or organised. As dense and multiform as her techniques and performances are and as challenging as the ideas and concepts she incorporates into them, an acquaintance with her work is more like a journey through an oeuvre, which in itself is an adventurous trip through the fields of interest and focal points that have marked the counterculture over the past forty years. She is represented by Zeno X gallery in Antwerpen and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin. From 1975 her work has been visible on a regular base all over the world, where she also lectured on her work.