Panamarenko
Panamarenko ( * 1940 in Antwerp; actually Henri Van Herwegen ) is a Belgian artist, engineer and poet. As a physicist, inventor and visionary at the same time Panamarenko represents a difficult to categorize position in contemporary art. His " poetic constructions ", mostly of aircraft installations are often of monumental proportions and both artistic and technical experiments.
It is the intent of the artist to produce fully functional machine, but so far none of his aircraft has risen into the air.
Life and work
Panamarenko attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which he left in 1962.
His use of a pseudonym - in public life his only name - goes back to this time. He first worked as a performance artist and organized happenings on the streets of Antwerp. He quickly gained a local reputation as an artist and graduated acquaintance with more established older artists such as Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers Through these early activities.
1968 presented Panamarenko, at the invitation of Joseph Beuys, his plane in the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The following year, his works have been exhibited in numerous galleries in the Federal Republic and the United States. 1972 invited him Harald Szeemann with the Aero Modeller to documenta-5.html">documenta 5 in Kassel ( in the Department of Individual Mythologies: Processes ), and made him so definitively known to an international audience. His works have been presented in 1972 and 1973 in a series of exhibitions in Lucerne, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart and issued in 1978 in the National Gallery in Berlin. In 1977 he was again a participant documenta documenta 6 in 1981 was the Aero Modeller at the Centre Pompidou in Paris to see. One of the first retrospective in 1982 in Munich, followed by a second in 1998 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. In 1992 he exhibited at the Documenta IX in Kassel with.
2005 in Brussels, in turn, a retrospective of his work shown. In October 2005, the artist on the occasion of his 65th birthday, his departure from the art.