Courtesy visit

The chaise aux Iris, a major night-time performance piece led by Jef Lambrecht in 1990, will be presented on Saturday 11 May at the Vincent van Gogh houses in Colfontaine and Cuesmes.

In 1990, Jef Lambrecht, the conceptual artist on show at the BPS22 from 1 June to 1 September, decided to take the title of the fictitious ​“Pope of Halensee” who was created and incarnated by Paul van Ostaijen at the start of the 20^th century. One night he took the chaise aux Iris, a wooden chair covered in collages, to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He performed the canon­i­sa­tion of the artist Vincent van Gogh here in 1990, which was also the year that the most expensive painting in the world to date, Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890), was sold at auction. The year 1990 also marked the anniversary of the artist’s death 100 years earlier.

With the help of Chris Straetling, gallery owner and former col­lab­o­ra­tor of Jef Lambrecht, and currently secretary of the non-profit organ­i­sa­tion Samarkand that looks after the Jef Lambrecht Fund, the chaise aux Iris will pay a courtesy visit this Saturday 11 May to the Van Gogh houses in Colfontaine at 12:00 pm and Cuesmes at 2:00 pm.