Lili Dujourie
Lili Dujourie (° 1941) studies both painting and sculpture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but without graduating. Dujourie is both a solitary and a seminal figure in Belgian art since the late sixties. Her work is rich in variation – of materials and techniques, of references to different periods in art history – but also remarkably consistent in its insistence on the emotional and cerebral precision that is particular to visual art.
In the late sixties and early seventies Dujourie engages mostly with recent and contemporary American art (abstract, minimal, conceptual), which is then the dominant force in the world of art, and formulates a critical reflection on it.
The 17 videos Dujourie made in 1972–1981 are another key part of her oeuvre. The series begins with the five versions of Hommage à… (1972), which establishes Dujourie as a proponent of both feminist and feminine aesthetics. In the seventies she also works with collages: sometimes using images from magazines, sometimes torn pieces of coloured paper.
From the early eighties onwards Dujourie works with a progression of distinct and sometimes very demanding materials: velvet, marble, lead, plaster, ceramics, steel, papier mâché etc. The Flemish ‘primitives’ of the fifteenth century and the baroque painters of the seventeenth century are an important inspiration for her ‘wall sculptures’, featuring carefully constructed cascades of velvet drapery in strong colours.