Chapellerie (2013)
MIXED TECHNIQUE
Chapellerie is an execution to scale of Angel Vergara’s 1994 installation of the same name. The neat interior of the hat shop reveals the artist’s fascination with Belgian Surrealism. The interior is like a nod to the petty-bourgeois imagery on the basis of which René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers also disrupted the bourgeois order. Behind the desk, Straatman, the shop’s estranged manager, has taken a seat. He poses not only as a living sculpture, but also as an artist who allows himself – covered in a white sheet – the freedom to define his position within society in complete anonymity