“The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Belgian artist Wim Legrand, born in 1978, lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Legrand offers a playful take on the paradoxical strangeness of everyday reality, while commenting on our postmodern condition as victims to the barrage of information and news feeds. Mundane and forgettable objects usher the familiar into peculiar allegorical narratives, where past blurs with present and fact with fiction – setting scenes in a liminal zone, in the unfettered “now” of a dream, meanings just out of reach and continually open to interpretation. Legrand combines painting with drawing, cartoons, and pop culture with aesthetic references to North European history painting and Surrealist traditions – the post-modern world overlaid onto the art historical atmosphere in which he was raised.
To date, Legrand has held solo shows in Belgium and South Africa and has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the globe. His most recent accolades include a group exhibition in Shanghai and a residency at Belgium’s renowned Frans Masereel Center. While you were sleeping is his first solo in The Netherlands.
Legrand’s everyday allegories are deceptively humorous and innocent; one cannot help but sense turmoil beneath the surface. Similarly, the show’s onomatopoeic title, with its lighthearted phonetics, masks the more serious connotations of such commotion.