‘Disco Inferno’ is an industrial monster with an insatiable appetite for its own products. Forty years of artistic research, experimentation and incessant output inform this Gesamtkunstwerk, which can be read as a self-portrait of Van Lieshout as obsessive system builder, seer, inventor, architect, maker of machine sculptures, engineer and shifter of boundaries.

Like all AVL works, ‘Disco Inferno’ is an exercise in self-sufficiency. It is a self-sustaining universe – a labyrinth of countless sculptures, handmade machines, hybrid engines, furniture, other artists’ work, utopias and dystopias – “all stemming from the hammer, the ultimate instrument of change”. The industrial monster is composed of giant, in-house designed and built machines, a spaghetti mash of generators, pumps and shredders, all propelled by a bizarre range of sculpted engines that can run on almost anything (vegetable oil, butter or homemade pyrolysis oil). It is a spectacle of industry and its potential in never-ending motion, yet the work’s only real purpose is to keep going – and to heat the jacuzzi in ‘The Happy End of Everything Spa’. Accompanied by the bubbling and pounding of all these machines, “as long as we have oil or waste plastic, we can keep dancing on the edge of the volcano”. JVL

With ‘Disco Inferno’, Van Lieshout continues to sculpt a new material vocabulary. Atelier Van Lieshout gained international recognition for living sculptural installations that function to assert or question independence; inventing objects, structures, machines and thematic bodies of work that annihilate the boundaries between art, architecture and design. In Van Lieshout’s distinctive language, everything is an experiment in what “could be”. AVL’s transgressive practice dissects and invents systems to flirt with power, autarky, politics, fertility, life, sex and death.

This is a resting place, a warehouse and a mirror of the mind rolled into one. The engineer who maintains Disco Inferno spends his days and nights here. He sits in his armchair, staring into space, obsessively working on ideas at his drawing board and never venturing outside. Only work counts for the engineer, he is completely emotionally and physically neglected. Even in bed, he is surrounded by a multitude of monitors showing non-stop video of machines destroying discarded consumer goods, for the spectacle and pleasure of the destruction itself or as an intermediate step in their reuse.

The Engineer’s Bedroom is where instincts, urges and the darkest fears live. The obsession with constantly wanting to create is overpoweringly present. The tools of choice are industrial lathes, milling machines and all kinds of cheap, Chinese-made equipment, destined to fail, but dominating the global market anyway due to price. That very same China has raised an army that marches across Tiananmen Square like a well-oiled machine. The soldiers march in perfect synch, dressed in custom uniforms, emotionless and ready to overrun the globe in a disciplined manner. Footage of Chinese military omnipotence is shown alongside that of primitive manufacturing processes in the Pakistani countryside – a form of inefficient and dangerous cottage industry that is intended to make people self-reliant.

There is no escape from The Engineer's Bedroom, but nevertheless the engineer tries. His state-of-the-art mushroom farm produces ingredients for pills, tinctures and creams. Combined with sensory deprivation devices, he creates a parallel reality. But of course he remains locked in his hole, forever condemned to worry and tinker.

Jan Börger (Rotterdam, 1929-2004) is one of the most eccentric Rotterdam visual artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His oeuvre consists mainly of pen drawings in a characteristic and idiosyncratic style, depicting female nudes and portraits.
Twenty years after the death of Börger, Brutus believes it is time for a retrospective of his work. Börger's monomaniacal work is questioned in the exhibition by the Rotterdam-based artist Juul Kraijer (Assen, 1970), whose work is regularly shown and appreciated at home and abroad.
We find similarities - no more than that - in the work of Kraijer. In the period from 1992 to 2004, she made exclusively drawings, most of them in charcoal, some with color accents in Conté chalk. Nowadays she also makes sculptures, photographs and videos, in which the formal language and symbolism she developed in her drawings can be unmistakably found.

Grand Opening Oct 4th from 19:00h

Non-functionality, originality and authenticity are the holy trinity of art. The exhibition 'I Am Not An Artist' shows how, in recent decades, Atelier Van Lieshout has systematically undermined these foundations and rewritten the definition of art.

'I Am Not An Artist' shows stacks of 3,500 beer crates and many hundreds of concrete pavement tiles: a reimagining of Van Lieshout's early sculptures that are a logical summation of standard products, modular sizing systems and chance. A new computer-generated work shows the hundreds of thousands of combinations of crate stacks possible within this space. In addition, a room is filled with the hard-edge and soft-edge furniture Van Lieshout used to add utility value to his work. These generically designed tables, cabinets, sinks and kitchens were produced by Atelier Van Lieshout, a company that provides custom solutions to everyday problems.

The early works represent a still-relevant pivotal point in Joep van Lieshout's 40-year career. Although his oeuvre has evolved enormously, the artist still morphs the boundaries and interpretation of art, ethics, progress and repression.