Léon Wuidar: Um die Ecke
IKOB – Museum für Zeitgenössiche Kunst, 2025Léon Wuidar (b. 1938) is a painter from Liège (BE). For the past six decades he has been exploring the possibilities of abstraction and geometry, using each canvas to create a meticulous composition that balances the interaction of shapes and colors. His work is rooted in concrete painting, a movement which privileges the purity of visual elements over representation or symbolism. Nevertheless, Wuidar’s oeuvre resists categorization: His formal restraint belies a propensity for jokes and anecdotes, and his unwavering precision unlocks a universe of aesthetic possibility.
This push and pull between freedom and restriction is inherent to play, the aspect of Wuidar’s work at the center of this exhibition. Cultural historian Johan Huizinga defines play as “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted, and having its aim in itself.” (Homo Ludens, 1938). Play exists somewhat outside of ordinary life but is essential to the development of culture. As Wuidar’s work reveals, artists similarly establish their own parameters, transforming limitation into liberation.
This exhibition presents more than forty paintings by Léon Wuidar spanning from 1965 to 2025. It unfolds across five thematic sections pertaining to different modes of play: language, balance, strategy, contest, and wisdom. A selection of Wuidar’s iconic carnets (notebooks) are also part of the exhibition. Their pages are filled with his daily sketches: miniature versions of his compositions. Occasionally he revisits them and adds color, and some of them eventually become paintings. In this game of infinitely variable components, Wuidar reveals how the freedom and joy of artistic expression emerge from constraint and endure through play.
To view and download publication designed by Claudia Schramke and possible.is (Matthias Hübner) with additional texts, click here.
Photography: Lola Pertsowsky