With the exhibition of Peter Buggenhout, the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park in Wuppertal is launching its new exhibition season on March 8, 2025: The Belgian sculptor presents a total of seven spatially expansive objects from different groups of works in two of the exhibition halls and in the outdoor area of the park. Buggenhout is internationally known for his sculptures, which he forms from discarded materials and which take on shape in space as sprawling bodily forms. The artist refers to his sculptures as "abject things" – as objects that evade familiar cognitive connections and demand more than just a perspective of observation.
The sculptures of Peter Buggenhout, born in 1963 in Dendermonde, Belgium, and living and working in Ghent, consist of things that have been deprived of the use of their original functionality: Waste and artifacts equally form the materials that the artist uses as his working material and from which he composes his objects. Used plastic films, tarpaulins, textile fabrics, newspapers, scrap metal, wood fragments, or organic substances like cow stomachs, horse hair, and dust become components of his works. Buggenhout creates massive forms from these abandoned remnants, which embody the emergence and decay in the immediate presence of the material and its rugged shapes.
Peter Buggenhout, who turned away from painting around 1990 to transition to sculptural designs, has been working for several years in groups of works with different material focuses and overarching themes. The pre-existing, the cyclical, and the temporality of things are fundamental themes that he formulates as diverse sculptural inventories in his groups of works.
His sculptures possess no single view direction; the multi-facetedness of his works is as essential as the significance of the equivalence and simultaneity of their elements. The discarded is always an important part of the foundation of his creation.
Peter Buggenhout about his work:
“The materials I use all have one thing in common: I did not choose them because I liked their shape or appearance. All objects that I find have in common that they do not really refer to a meaning in terms of their formal identity. For example, instead of an old chair, I might use a piece from the chair in such a way that it’s not noticeable what kind of object it was before. This is the quality of waste, so to speak. Dust also possesses this quality. All my working materials are 'abject,' that is, discarded or disgusting… taken from their original state, have lost their form and meaning.”
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