The Concrete brings together ‘optical’ and ‘kinetic’ works created in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The works are based on tangible materials and structures and relate to our physical and sensorial existence. But they differ from the more familiar abstract art of Late Modernism – not least the American Abstract Expressionist painters (Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly and others), for whom abstraction is often a form of ‘representation’ of the unrepresentable. By contrast, the Concrete becomes a ‘tool’ for intervening in the real (material, social, political) world by exposing and thereby changing its materiality.

Some of the works in this ensemble are shown in Antwerp, while others are exhibited in Eindhoven.