Adventures in the Print Trade: Intense and diverse

This Sunday sees the opening of an exciting new exhibition in the Cultural Centre (Cultuurcentrum) of Hasselt in Belgium. Entitled Helikon: intens en divers, it celebrates the work of the pioneering Helikon gallery, which brought contemporary and avant-garde art to Hasselt through the 1960s. It will run until Sunday 10 January 2010.

The main members of the Helikon group were Pierre Cox, Paule Nolens, Lucienne Porta, Ray Remans, Amand van Rompay, Robert Vandereycken, and Walter Vilain. Although I have recently acquired work by many Belgian artists of the 1970s, in a nearly complete run of the graphics portfolios De Bladen voor de Grafiek, unfortunately I don’t have any work to show by any of the Helikon artists. However, courtesy of Jo Klaps, the designer of the exhibition, I can offer a link here to photos of the exhibition in preparation.

The curator of the exhibition, who has also written the catalogue, is my friend, the art historian Zsuzsanna Böröcz. It has been my great pleasure to be able to lend a number of graphic works to the exhibition by various European artists whose art was exhibited by Helikon. For all those who will not be able to make to see the show in situ (sadly, including myself), here is a mini-exhibition of the works currently on loan from Idbury Prints to Helikon: intens en divers. And for the information of any curators reading this blog, I am always happy to lend work for exhibition if I can.