« Assemblages » presents a selection of works by Bernard Villers and Tatiana Wolska, punctuated by movements of fragmentation and reconstruction. Tearing, cutting, collaging and reassembling… their respective practices share the same economy of means, favoring the immediacy of gestures and the simplicity of materials.
Despite its title, this project presents works that depart from what may have been defined by the seminal exhibition «The Art of Assemblage» organized by William Seitz at MoMA in 1961. The exhibition offered the first synthesis of this practice, so dear to the twentieth-century avant-garde, and included cubist collages by Braque, Picasso and Gris, Futurist typographic collages, a marvellous selection of works by Kurt Schwitters, composite objects by the Surrealists as well as the work of the Affichiste artists and New Realism. These works, drawn from different eras and artistic currents, all have in common the desire to introduce heterogeneous fragments of sensible reality into art. The techniques of juxtaposition and collage are vectors of connection, freeing us from the hierarchies and boundaries between disciplines, while placing the work in a relationship of cyclical exchange between art and life¹.
Bernard Villers and Tatiana Wolska share a common relationship with found objects and fragments of everyday life. But in contrast to the heterogeneity of disparate materials typical of historical assemblages, both artists work formally by recycling and arranging coherent elements. The Recollages series by Bernard Villers, begun in 1976 and whose gesture endures to the most recent pieces produced in 2025, shows the delicate deconstruction of a sheet of paper torn and then glued back together. The joints of the collage are visible, the adhesive embraces the fragments it unites and overflows from the verso to the recto. Despite his measured gestures, Villers cultivates deviations and imperfections, in search of a balance between rationality and unpredictability. Tatiana Wolska similarly likes to be surprised by her own compositions. Her practice is also characterized by the discipline of a repeated gesture, a protocol of transformation that she applies to a body of materials gleaned from the scraps and leftovers of the urban landscapes. Segmented transport pallets, cut and thermo-welded water bottles or simple torn-off sheets of paper undergo an instinctive, organic metamorphosis under her hands.
Combining chance and determination, Bernard Villers and Tatiana Wolska’s assemblages open up new fields of investigation into reality. Going to the essence of any plastic or pictorial composition, i.e. the desire to reorganize and reconstruct the ordinary², the resulting works affirm their own material reality as much as they bear witness to the processes of transformation that run through them.
– Amélie Bataille
¹ Kurt Schwitters’ notion of the «Mertz» (1919), which aims to link and create connections between everything in the world, is a case in point.
² To quote Maurice Denis, we must «remember that a painting, before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain assembled order» (Art et Critique, 1890).
Polish artist Tatiana Wolska (1977) lives and works in Brussels. Her multidisciplinary practice is characterised by organic growth, the proliferation of forms and the hybridisation of objects. Using simple means and evocative gestures, Tatiana Wolska transforms plastic bottles, discarded metal and recycled wood into the foundations of mechanisms of propagation and amplification.
Bernard Villers (1939) is a major figure of the Belgian art scene. In his works, Bernard Villers constantly combines surface, light and colour, playing with the infinite possibilities of pictorial practice and its effects on our perception. The Belgian painter seeks his inspiration in the banal, marginal and imperceptible aspects of everyday life to create minimal interventions often inspired by language, poetry or literature.
Press release
Communiqué de presse
This project is supported by the Polish Institute in Brussels on the occasion of the Polish presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Opening Thursday 16.01, 5pm > 9pm
Exhibition until Saturday 1.03
Location
Irène Laub gallery
29 rue Van Eyck
1050 Brussels (BE)
Read more about Bernard Villers and Tatiana Wolska