Guillaume Bijl

Guillaume Bijl
b. 1946, Antwerp, Belgium; lives and works in Berchem, Belgium
 
The administrative professions Guillaume Bijl practised in the seventies to earn a living proved to be more important than the art courses he started in the 1960s, but never completed. This “university of life” in the lower middle-class circuit he travelled made Bijl realize that art – even if it is conceptual – should represent a reality that is as broad as possible. For more than thirty years Bijl has been building a consistent oeuvre, which he regards as “realistic testimonies to visually account for my time”. As a kind of European adherent of appropriation art, an American art movement that emerged in the early 1980s with artists like Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, Bijl reproduces existing images from everyday life almost literally with the aim of “revealing ourselves by removing the codes used by our consumer society as image clichés”.