Lupe - tentoonstelling 21 november tot 12 december 2015

Jason Poirier dit Caulier and Patrick Verelst are pleased to invite you for the opening of the exhibition ‘LUPE’, paintings by Patrick Verelst on 21 November 2015 from 14-18h.





“I was fascinated by a scene in the Laurel & Hardy movie “Hollywood party”, where a girl at the bar gets in a fit of rage because she isn’t allowed a drink. I looked her up in the credits and found out that her name was Lupe Velez, a Hollywood actress that became famous because of the story surrounding her suicide in 1944, at age 36. During her movie career she became notorious because of her temper and stormy love affairs. She slashed her lover Gary Cooper with a knife, (ending the relation, Cooper reportedly had lost 45 pounds and was suffering from nervous exhaustion), did the same to her later husband Johnny ’Tarzan’ Weismuller, and once to herself. When I learned about her basically kind, but probably bipolar personality, and about the extremely gifted actress and dancer she was, I decided to make some paintings about her demons and the slashing thereof. I later found out that Andy Warhol made a factory movie about her in 1965, featuring Edie Sedgwick in the titular role."
Patrick Verelst (Antwerp, 1948) is both an in- and outsider of the art world. He has been working in the gallery circuit as assistant or gallery owner. Today he is a private dealer. Only to an intimate circle he is also know as a painter.
He worked as gallery assistant for Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp, John Weber Gallery in New York, and — together with Marc Poirier dit Caulier— ran the Gallery Patrick Verelst – Marc Poirier dit Caulier Gallery in Antwerp. 
In the 80ies he moved to New York working as assistant at the John Weber and Leo Castelli Gallery. He returned to Antwerp to reopen a gallery with exhibitions of Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, Ronnie Cutrone, Jonathan Lasker, Walter Swennen and others.
In the early eighties few works were sporadically included in shows at Isy Brachot, Brussels, Montevideo, Antwerp, Olsen Gallery New York, Museum d’Hondt Dhaenens, Deurle and ICC Antwerp.
Patrick Verelst has always continued painting, but destroyed most of the works by force of habit. It was the correspondence between him and Jasper Johns that convinced him to keep some of his paintings, as the latter persuaded him not to destroy them anymore. For years his paintings have never seen an audience, but in memory of his friendship with Marc Poirier dit Caulier he has now decided to exhibit them, not as a starting point of a new artistic carreer, but to openly invite viewers to a lesser-known side of his practice.
From 21 November till 12 December 2015
On friday and Saturday, from 14-18h
PLUS-ONE.BE
@plus_one_art (instagram) PLUS ONE
Sint-Hubertusstraat 58+
2600 Berchem — Belgium