Michiel Ceulers invites James Beckett for a duo exhibition at DMW Gallery inspired by car deaths and cardboard-framed paintings.

Michiel Ceulers has a history of artworks that investigate their own medium. His paintings have a small, rather dirty outlook consciously referencing various historical styles. The smudged marks, thumb prints, ripped and badly stretched canvases are integral to Ceulers’ work. The artist is not interested in beautiful or representational pictures; his works simply analyse shapes in colour, material and light. Once the works have left the confines of his studio they cease to be in a constant state of flux, and finally become.

Coming from a background of installation art, Beckett’s work spans many genres and bears the mark of several stages of the industrial revolution, such as the foundation of synthetic colour manufacture and its relationship to BASF, and the cultural implications of vacuum tubes for the Dutch firm Philips. Without humour his work would appear as mere cynicism – it is romance with an inherently rotten subject matter which offers some sort of redemption in a modern world. In keeping with these themes, the works on display at the exhibition ‘Potential Dwellers’ are entries into the recent series ‘Most Notable Car Deaths’ (2017), comprised of imposing sculptures and prints combining auto parts with more traditional materials.