An Abstract Language of Art by Vanessa Joan Müller

Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens is inviting Viennese art historian, writer and curator Vanessa Joan Müller to give a lecture on the exhibition Eloquent Formalism. She will primarily talk about “the universal language of art” in a postwar context, specifically within the selection of works from Jan and Lieve Andries-Vanlouwe's art collection currently on display at the museum.

The Andries-Vanlouwe collection brings together works by important postwar artists. Like many private art collections established in the 1960s in Belgium, the Netherlands and the Rhineland, this collection focuses on abstract trends in art.

This lecture discusses Andries-Vanlouwe's selection of artworks in the light of broader trends in postwar art in the West and their implied ideology. What are the implications of the idea of accessibility and “legibility” of the artwork, and how do we look at these works today, now that the idea of a “universal language of art” has lost its validity?