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Guy Rombouts

©image: M HKA
©image: M HKA
Guy Rombouts installing 'Period', M HKA, 2011

° 1949

Born in Leuven (BE), lives in Antwerp (BE).

Guy Rombouts (°1949) receives an education as a printer/typographer, and since the seventies he has been working on alternative communications systems. For various reasons, Rombouts questions our current communication systems.

The father of Rombouts was a typographer and printer in Geel. He also was the publisher of the local newspaper Het Nieuwsblad van Geel. Printer's type is therefore one of Rombouts’ earliest everyday experiences. Rombouts first studies typography, but later, in part inspired by the exhibition program during the seventies of the Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp, he decides to become a sculptor.

According to Rombouts, direct communication is not possible via our language and, as a consequence, some feelings simply cannot be put into words. That is why as of 1979 he searches for systems, in which form and content interact as much as possible. He and his partner, Monica Droste (1958-1998), develop an alphabet with the name AZART. In the alphabet words take on forms. AZART refers to AZ-Art, as in art from A to Z, but also to the French term hasard, which means as much as coincidence. Each letter corresponds to a line that has a predetermined name. Every letter of the alphabet also gets its own colour, which corresponds with the first letter of that colour.

Alongside the AZART alphabet, Rombouts continues to develop new alphabets of colours, foodstuffs and other materials or immaterial phenomena, always connecting his sense of language and material.

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Exhibitions & Ensembles