Peter Downsbrough's Spatial Grammar at MAC's Grand-Hornu

Peter Downsbrough, born 1940 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and based in Brussels, presents two works at Musée des Arts Contemporains (MAC's) in Grand-Hornu as part of the group exhibition 'Le Miroir et les chemins,' running until October 14, 2012. Downsbrough's practice spans room pieces, wall pieces, books, films, and sound recordings, all exploring the conjunction 'and' and the preposition 'between' as structural devices. His work interrogates space, language, and architecture through minimal elements: lines, tubes, words. The exhibition includes pieces like 'Two Lines,' 'Pipes and Poles,' 'Écart et Trace,' and 'The Vide That Is' (2012, Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris). Downsbrough's installations often use mirrored text and black adhesive to create open frames that engage the gallery's real space. He references El Lissitzky's typographic principles and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Recent solo shows include Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne (2011), Chelsea Space, London (2011), and Secession, Vienna (2011). The text is authored by Line Herbert-Arnaud, an art historian and critic.