In the previous posts we looked at exhibitions opening in September, but there are plenty of events to visit also this Summer and, among them, you may find some gems. At the beginning of July, the exhibition "Panamarenko: Come Fly with Me" (until 8th January 2023) opened at the Ten Bogaerde Arts Centre, in the Belgian seaside resort of Koksijde.
The event focuses on Panamarenko’s desire to understand the miracle of flight and invites visitors to take an imaginary journey with his amazing flying machines.
The Belgian artist and inventor Henri Van Herwegen, AKA Panamarenko, had a profound passion for science and technology that prompted him to build aircrafts, flying machines and other amazing inventions. If implemented by engineers, some of them may have turned into real machines, others such as a flying carpet and a backpack with a propeller, were instead fantastical objects that could have never been built.
Born in Antwerp in 1940, Van Herwegen studied at the local Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He developed an interest in aeronautics at the scientific library at the University of Antwerp and, in the '60s, he became known as Panamarenko (at times shortened as "Panama"). The name was a contraction of "Pan American Airlines and Company" combined with the name of a Russian general, Panteleimon Kondratyevich Ponomarenko, that he heard in 1958 over his self-made transistor radio on which he was able to receive a Potsdam (then part of the DDR) radio station.
In the '60s Panamarenko met Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, where Beuys was a teacher at the art academy.
Encouraged by Beuys, and fascinated by the flight of birds and planes, Panamarenko created his first flying machine, "Das Flugzeug", a pedal-powered plane, followed by the 28-metre long zeppelin called "The Aeromodeller", made of glued strips of PVC film and featuring a rattan palm cabin sprayed in silver (the ideas was that the airship would have allowed the artist to move through the sky, so the cabin was designed like a private home; the airborne house was designed to impress Brigitte Bardot…).
Then came mechanical chickens and birds that looked like prehistoric dinosaurs, fantastical planes, cars, boats (the "Scotch Gambit", an armoured vessel made of stainless-steel plates), submarines (the "Nova Zembla" that featured fins like a fish and blades like an insect) and even UFOs.
Each machine was different, but all were characterized by the same problem: they were all more or less utopian follies, like his "Pepto Bismo", a flying device composed of a series of short rotor-propellers, worn on the pilot’s back. Panamarenko stopped his artistic activities in 2005 and retired. He died in 2019.
For the exhibition at Koksijde, the converted 13th century storage barn of the Ten Bogaerde has been turned into a flying hall for a selection of Panamarenko's works. This exhibition aims at showing how Panamarenko shaped his desire to understand the wonder of flying and invites the visitors to follow the thoughts and dreams of the artist.
The exhibition also sparks contrasting feeling and emotions about the works on display: Panamarenko's inventions are indeed fascinating, but they are also dangerous; they are complex, but unable to perform the task for which they were designed and built.
The key lesson to learn from him is that you can use science and engineering to make art (or reinterpret these disciplines through art), but the exhibition leaves you with a question - was Panamarenko an artist or an inventor?
Well, his works looked technical, but they were more artistic. So, while Panamarenko was interested in the technical complexity of his works, he was first and foremost an artist, or maybe an eccentric inventor led by imagination. Inventors often create useful and handy things, but originally the term "inventor" was used to define somebody with a bright and vivid mind, capable of creating wonderful (yet not necessarily useful...) things.
In many ways Panamarenko perfectly incarnated this figure of inventor as he let his imagination wander ending up creating objects that were "too beautiful to really function" as he used to say. Maybe his flying saucers and spaceships that could not actually fly or his back-pack levitation devices and solar-powered prehistoric birds were not useful, but surely their combination of science and fantasy still show that Panamarenko was a unique artist with an unlimited imagination and a passion for unconventional beauty.
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