“Re-Opening” is a group show with which Deweer Gallery opens its doors after a thorough renovation and rebuilding of the entire gallery. But it’s not only that. “Re-Opening” is also meant as our personal, artistic statement. It brings together some 25 young, emerging and established artists from the Deweer Gallery’s programme and from the international scene. The artists who haven’t been shown at Deweer Gallery so far – most of them haven’t even been shown in Belgium, are simply people we’ve discovered in recent years and who’s work fascinates us endlessly. They work in all media and they were invited to take part on the basis of instinctive, personal choice. Yet, as our work on the show was evolving, we noticed that our choices weren’t that random after all. It seemed as if some interests that have characterized the gallery’s history from the beginning, left a ‘mark’ on this show too. Once we had realized this aspect, we elaborated it and divided “Re-Opening” into three chapters. Each chapter takes up one of the three exhibition halls we now have at our disposal, and two of them are curated entities. In the newly built exhibition hall, Room I, and in the adjacent Lobby, new or rarely shown works by a number of individual positions form the first chapter of “Re-Opening”. Both Michaël Aerts and Stephan Balkenhol made new sculptural works for this exhibition. We present two works by Sergey Bratkov from his seminal project “Ukraine”, a series in which Bratkov portrays his native country in his typically ironical and surrealist style. Jan Fabre is represented by a series of “thought models”, some of which refer to the concept of our permanent installation, and all of which have been shown and published in “Kijkdozen en Denkmodellen”, the catalogue from the eponymous show at the Flemish Parliament in 2006. Each model is now accompanied by a drawing from the eighties that was never shown before. We selected several important works by Günther Förg, including a rare series on lead and a painting that featured in “Günther Förg. Malerei”, a crucial show that stimulated the reception and recognition of Förg’s work in the Low Lands and Germany in 1991. The show also features three new paintings by Tatjana Gerhard, and Melissa Gordon is introduced with two new paintings from her series “Structures for Viewing”. Based on his obsession with the rendition of child victims and the link with baroque iconography, Enrique Marty made the sculpture “Pablito”. Benjamin Moravec has recently started to experiment with paintings integrated into spatial installations; we show the first installation that resulted from it. Panamarenko’s “Ijsvogel” is one of the very few large sculptures still to be seen outside private and institutional collections. Also in the Lobby is a group of drawings by Jorinde Voigt, whose poetical and innovative work was never shown in any Belgian gallery. Another première for Belgium is the work of Yehudit Sasportas, who shows new drawings from a body of work she created for her upcoming solo at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And last but not least, Norbert Witzgall, whose installation “Quod Lizbeth” we’ve shown at the latest Art Brussels, continues to explore the possibilities of the portrait and created several new paintings.