Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery is pleased to welcome the artists duo Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil for their second solo show at the gallery.

Working as a twosome, Feipel & Bechameil produce installations where there is a mix of illusion, imagination, instability and illogicality within gridded and controlled places in the contemporary world. As sculptors but also amateur researchers and engineers, informed by a great sensibility with regard to the theatricality of the world and its various forms of beauty, they create works within a socio-historical, aesthetic, political and technical approach. In combining their many areas of know-how in various fields - drawing, sculpture, engineering, directing and presentation, and sets -, they are producing an oeuvre that is as formally accomplished as it is powerfully engaged.

As artists, they have no certainties about ideal social and cultural models, but they are forever questioning human life by way of themes such as the social and collective setting, life styles, the forms of architecture people occupy and the objects which accompany us in our daily round, the landscape that is presented to us, and the areas of freedom we are given, as well as the future being traced out for us. As robotics hackers Feipel&Bechameil propose a re-appropriation of the realm of technology in a sensitive way, using an eminently political gesture: taking possession of the expertise and know-how of industrial robotics, to apply them to the creation of artworks which describe our world in a different way.

The exhibition « While You Sleep » places Nature at the center of the its reflection. Entirely designed and implemented in the periods of lockdown of the current health crisis, it functions as an introspection and takes an interrogative look at our environment and nature. The artists apprehend their environment in its most raw and purified forms with an imagined, fantasized and dreamed view of nature.

The work of Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil addresses the question of space. Their work shows in a destructive manner, the hidden complexity of the ideas in the traditional way of constructing space. At the same time, their work also opens a perception for an alternative reflection. In it, art and society go hand and hand. Past, present and future, the artist duo Feipel & Bechameil deal with all times at once one. Firmly attuned to the present (robotization) so as to better consider the future (the consequences of a robotized world on humans), the artist duo nonetheless proposes a rereading of the history and utopias of modernity: dada, De Stijl, the Bauhaus and all the modernist movements that, before the invention of the atom bomb, believed in the compatibility of technical progress and humankind.

Martine Feipel was born in 1975 in Luxembourg. Jean Bechameil was born in 1964 in Paris. They have worked together since 2008 and currently live in Brussels.

Martine Feipel studied visual art at the UdK in Berlin and Central Saint Martins in London. Jean Bechameil attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. He has also worked to design the sets on a variety of films, including several of Lars Von Trier’s.

In addition to being selected in 2011 to represent Luxembourg for the 54th Venice Biennale, Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil have also been invited to participate in many international exhibitions and cultural events – for instance at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, the Beaufort Triennale of art by the sea in Belgium, and the Nuit Blanche in Paris, to name only a few. In 2017, Casino Luxembourg -Forum for contemporary art dedicated a monographic exhibition to them and in 2020 the occupied the HAB galerie in Nantes for the periode of the summer with the exhibition Automatic Revolution. The duo joined the exhibition « Listen to your eyes » in November 2020 at the Museum Voorlinden in The Netherlands and entered the collection of the museum. The artists have been nominated to create an installation for the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL) and to design the metro station « Canal Parc Technologique » on the new metro line to be built in Toulouse, France.