Artist: Hedwig Brouckaert

New York city based artist Hedwig Brouckaert is currently working on a body of work for two solo shows, one at the Emory & Henry College in Virginia, where she is invited as visiting artist in January 2022, and one for Galerie El in September in Belgium. She has been developing Peel (America), a collage series of magazine images of skin on marble tiles, which she started during the lockdown. She says the tiled walls in public spaces have become like skin surfaces that were feared during the pandemic, as touch has become complicated. She is fascinated by the contrast between the depth and time visible in a marble tile, created by age-old geographical processes, and the temporality of magazine paper. “Even though magazines – and mass media images in general – arrive as pristine, glowing objects in the mail or on the newsstand they are meant to disappear quickly and to become trash, to be replaced by the most recent up-to-date information,” she says.