To Be Determined. According To The Situation

“Welcome to the world of Dirk Zoete. Because that’s what his work is: a conceived universe. The way someone leaning over a table makes a plan and imagines the world. While technology takes us into several intangible dimensions with virtual reality and other applications, Zoete makes us believe the world is still flat. Everything seems to have only a front and a back. As if we still believed that the earth is just a disk, and we can fall off. Zoete’s drawings are clumsy, intermittent, naive, adventurous, simple. It’s like a child’s imagination, depicting in a heap what you otherwise cannot fit on a piece of paper.” – Philippe Van Cauteren

Published in occasion of his first major solo exhibition in a Belgian museum, To be determined. According to the situation, held at S.M.A.K. in Gent in 2017, this catalogue explores Dirk Zoete’s peculiar practice. Enriched by essays and texts by Philippe Van Cauteren, Stephan Berg, Koen Peeters and Ann Hoste, the book is a journey through the artist’s process – who, starting from a drawing, generates models, sculptures, architectural constructions, photos, films. An all-encompassing approach that makes the Belgian’s work outstand as a natural successor of the German Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism, but with a more human touch.

The catalogue features a wide selection of images, presenting the many different stages of transformation of a drawing into a three-dimensional piece, and the hybrid nature of the exhibition set-up, a mix of a museum show and an artist’s studio, both essential characteristics of Zoete’s art.