Bernd Lohaus: The Way Things Settle
Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, 2026Click here to watch a video with documentation and an interview about the exhibition.
Bernd Lohaus (1940-2010) was an artist who worked in sculpture, painting and drawing. He was born in Düsseldorf, where he first studied classical sculpture and later became a student of Joseph Beuys. In the mid 1960’s, he moved to Antwerp, where he founded the ‘Wide White Space’ gallery with his wife, Anny De Decker, and brought the international avant-garde to Belgium while continuing to develop his own artistic practice. From the 1970’s onwards, he focused more intensely on his art, gradually establishing himself as a key figure of his generation within the international movements of social sculpture, Fluxus and Arte Povera.
This posthumous exhibition centered on a series of action paintings from the 1970’s, for which the artist thrust handfuls of pure pigment against the corners of his studio in the Verbondstraat in Antwerp, leaving behind explosive bursts of colour that transformed the space into a three-dimensional canvas. Three of these works, realised in the primary colours of blue, yellow and red, are reenacted for the exhibition, the loose powder resting on the walls and floor of the gallery. These works can never be realised in the same way twice, and their re-staging intends to bring out aspects of unpredictability and vulnerability in Lohaus’ diverse oeuvre. The three in situ works are shown alongside works on canvas from the same period.
Bernd Lohaus was first and foremost a sculptor. He worked with wood, stone and paper, and is most well-known for his constellations of heavy pieces of azobé wood, which he would find along the banks of the river Scheldt and at the docks of Antwerp. The discolouration and scarring of the material, the traces of its past life, are a crucial component of these works. Lohaus would place his found materials in relation to each other and often engraved the wood with words and text fragments, as if to make them speak. Through his art, Lohaus was negotiating his place in social configurations: as an artist participating in the art world, as a citizen, as a family member. Each abstraction is rooted in reality, connecting art with life.
Though they are not sculptures in the classical sense, we can consider the works in this exhibition in this context as well: through the manipulation of a ‘pure’ material, Lohaus changes the configuration of an environment. The diptych Untitled (1971) is made up of two canvases that stand side by side on the floor. Most of the large surface is unpainted, except for the two connecting edges where loose vertical brushstrokes of blue touch each other, breaking the symmetry of the work. The scale of the painting, the way it leans into the space, the marks it bears of wear and tear, all position it as a sculptural gesture and a space unto itself. The work exists more in a dynamic situation of doing than as a composed, fixed surface.
Another painting, Untitled (1978), is the carrier for the German word träumend, which Lohaus spelled out across the canvas in all caps with yellow oil based crayon. Träumend is the present participle form of dreaming — not the infinitive verb träumen, but the verb set in motion through action. Dreaming takes place only inside someone’s mind. It implies a movement, but not one that can be physically observed. The painting expresses and encourages an active internal process; one whose outcome remains open. As with the action paintings, Lohaus points in a direction but does not dictate a specific message.
The exhibition borrows its title, ‘The Way Things Settle’, from a 1967 poem by Michael Benedikt. The poem expresses a universal struggle in life: the desire to connect with others versus the need for autonomy. It speaks to how distance is inevitable in any relationship, even in the way we relate to ourselves and our actions, or between an artist and their work. There is a duality present in many of Lohaus’ works, the opposition between ‘me’ and ‘you’, self and other. Objects and materials retain their individuality but lean towards and rub up against each other in co-dependency. Here too, pigment settles on and into the walls and floor, creating a situation of intimacy between two things without changing the material conditions of either: an active state of holding and being held.
The Way Things Settle, 1967
Michael Benedikt
There will always be a distance
Even when things are pressing
Against one another, so hard
That even crockery expresses a fluidity.
There will always be a gap to see through
And when the clouds seem to separate
So far, that the sky is
Almost embarrassingly present
There won’t be any place to lie down.
But your complexion will seem transparent.
In all the various directions
Things are forming a configuration
That will be hard to break.
Photography by Joost Joossen - Courtesy Gallery Sofie Van de Velde