Didier Vermeiren

Didier Vermeiren (born July 10, 1951) is a Belgian sculptor. His first works, in the 1970s, stood at the crossroads of conceptual art, minimal art and the tradition of modern sculpture. Afterwards, the photographical documentation of his own work became more and more significant, until it became an entire aspect of it, photographs and sculptures responding to each other and generating new works all the while. Didier Vermeiren lives and work in Paris and Brussels. He has been teaching since 2002 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany and since 1991 at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (Netherlands). He is a member of the board of the Musée Rodin (Paris). In the late 1970s, he turned his attention to the question, essential in the history of modern sculpture, of the plinth, or base. creating the « plinth sculptures » through which he was introduced to the international art scene, starting with a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, titled An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. Traditionally, the base was not considered to be part of the sculpture, but served to transport the sculpted figure from the "real" space into the artistic or monumental space. The function of the plinth as pedestal then gradually disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Whereas certain artists, like Brancusi, turned the plinth into an integral part of their work by incorporating it into the sculpture, others no longer wanted the sculpted object to be separated from the ground by this presentational element and chose to place the sculpture directly on the floor, on the same level as the spectator. Modernism, in other words, made the plinth useless. Taking this development seriously, but wanting to think it through more rigorously, Vermeiren reevaluated the purpose of the plinth and turned it into an autonomous volume in the space: if the plinth is a base or a foundation, it can be displayed for its own sake and on its own merits, taking on the fate of a work of art.