"Panamarenko universe".

Kuo, Michelle

MUSEUM VAN HEDENDAAGSE KUNST ANTWERPEN * October 3. 2014--February 22, 2015 * Curateci by Hans Willemse.* with Panamarenko Buckminster Fuller made civil engineering utopian, but Panamarenko made it weird. in the 1960s, the Belgian artist turned from proto-Conceptual assemblages to a design problem that would consume the rest of his career: the invention of experimental flying machines. By turns absurd and monumental, his constructions borrowed from the aerodynamics of blimps, hot-air balloons, cocoons, gondolas, race cars, winged fauna, and parachutes; from Skylab, Pan Am, Leonardo, Utopie, jet propulsion, and satellites. He even tried to fly one such zeppelin, the Aeromocleller, to a Dutch sculpture park in 1971 (with harrowing results). Such pneumatic forays paralleled many contemporaneous explorations of space, speed, and the expanded field of art; this retrospective of the artist--whose own domicile recently reopened as a historic site in Antwerp--brings together some sixty of his works and dirigibles, demonstrating that Panamarenko went farther and faster than most.

--Michelle Kuo

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]