Whistling A Happy Tune: Drawings/tekeningen

This monograph offers the first survey of Belgian painter Michael Borremans' drawings. Like the paintings, the drawings favor absurd fragmentary figures that inhabit an indeterminate time. Because of Borremans' drab palate, these figures dwell in a gloomy universe that only heightens the uncanny subject matter. Critic David Coggins has noted, "Michael Borremans' portraits of somber young men, elusively posed before muted backgrounds, create a tone of uncertainty that becomes a virtue, not an evasion. Working both large and small, he grounds his paintings (all oil on canvas) in traditional Realism, achieving finely rendered details, soft light and surfaces that are delicate and painterly." The drawings envelop viewers in a similarly surreal, ambiguous and unreliable universe, depicted with a subdued combination of pencil, watercolor, ballpoint, white ink and coffee washes. They make use of newspapers, books, magazines and turn-of-the-century photographic archives as source material. This volume includes an essay by critic and art historian Michael Amy. Borremans is represented in New York by David Zwirner.

Belgium-based Michael Borremans creates absurd and sometimes ominous paintings. "Horse Hunting" (2005), for example, depicts, in a muddy palette, a pale and moody looking man in a suit jacket and crisp white shirt shoving two twigs up his nose. He stares straight at us and the wall behind him is filled with his shadow. Borremans has said of his paintings, "I use cliches and other elements that are part of a collective consciousness my work would be perfect on biscuit tins." At the 2006 Berlin Biennale, Borremans showed a film on a small LCD screen, which he had framed like a painting. The piece was based on a 2002 drawing of a girl, which he reproduced in three dimensions, so that the girl slowly spins around. Whatever the medium, Borremans' work bears this trademark sense of absurdity verging on menace. "Weight" is published concurrently with an exhibition at De Appel in Amsterdam.