This summer, Bozar launches Bozar Monumental. The BNP Paribas Fortis series, in the heart of the Centre for Fine Arts of Brussels. Starting this summer, Bozar will commission each year one artist to create a site-specific artwork made especially for the Horta Hall, embracing and challenging the volume, materials and history of this monumental space. The first edition is in the hands of German artist Michael Beutler (b. 1976), known for his large-scale, playful architectural installations. For this premiere, Beutler has designed an eight-metre-high cylindrical artwork that slowly rotates. Bozar Monumental breathes new life into the Horta Hall – designed a century ago by Victor Horta – and restores its original function: a monumental space dedicated to sculpture.
Image above: Bozar Monumental: Michael Beutler [installation view in de Horta Hall, Bozar, Brussels] © Courtesy of the artist / photo: We Document Art.
Born in 1976 in Oldenburg, Michael Beutler lives and works in Berlin. The internationally renowned German artist inaugurates the first edition of Bozar Monumental. Known for his ingenious large-scale architectural installations, Beutler creates engaging, playful works that spark the imagination. An inventive craftsman, he creates handmade tools that allow him to develop the materials needed for his constructions. These are usually simple, sustainable, locally sourced materials such as cardboard, paper, wood, or bamboo. Beutler’s work is open and constantly evolving, placing as much importance on the process – which is visible rather than hidden behind studio doors – as on the finished object.
A monumental “rotating gate”
For Bozar, Beutler has created a cylindrical structure that floats. It is made from printed wood (the pool and benches), bamboo (the carrying structure) and hand-made laminated steel-band and paper mesh (the skin). Perceived by the artist as a “rotating gate”, it turns with your help around a central axis in a pool of water. After Pequod (2015, Hamburger Bahnhof), Beutler’s installation at Bozar – 8 metres high and 13 metres in diameter – is the largest “rotating gate” the artist has ever created.
Viewers become part of the artwork
The installation – freely accessible – invites the public to linger in the Horta Hall and experience the space in a new and lively way. Standing inside this monumental architectural construction, one might imagine the gate functioning as a film camera executing a long tracking shot, or as a giant zoetrope, the animation device that creates the illusion of movement. Seated on the benches, the sensation of movement could also evoke the feeling often experienced inside a train as it departs from a station. With this rotating gate, Beutler unsettles our senses and invites us to navigate the illusion of movement, encouraging a deeper observation of the surrounding volumes and architecture. The natural light changes daily, altering the mood of the space and making each experience unique.
Bozar – including Michael Beutler’s installation – will remain accessible all summer, without interruption.
About Bozar Monumental
Launching a new series of annual commissions: Bozar Monumental
Text by Zoë Gray, Exhibition Director, Bozar
Bozar is a century-old building that is deceptively monumental. This sprawling labyrinth structured across eight levels is cleverly embedded into the side of Le Mont des Arts/de Kunstberg. Its modest façade belies the scale of its interior, so that even when visitors enter the vestibule, the amplitude of the institution remains hidden. It is only upon walking into the temple-like space of the Horta Hall that Bozar’s monumentality becomes tangible. Architect Victor Horta designed this space as an indoor plaza that was also to function as a sculpture hall. However, after an initial presentation of truly monumental works by Antoine Bourdelle in 1928, it has had a history of varied uses, both official and unsanctioned. These include being used as a theatre, an examination hall, a car showroom, or occupied as a site of protest.
With the series Bozar Monumental, we return the Horta Hall to its original function as a stage for sculpture for two months each summer. We will commission an artist to create a site-specific artwork that both embraces and challenges the monumentality of the space. By focusing on new commissions, produced for Bozar by living artists, this series symbolises the centrality of artistic practice to the institution, underscoring it as a place of creation and experimentation, a palace for les arts vivants.
The invited artists have an enthusiasm and aptitude for working on a large scale, but their practices or chosen materials challenge traditional notions of sculptural monumentality. Today, the idea of the monumental evokes contradictory sentiments, with simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion. What is for some a symbol of stability is for others a symbol of exclusion, of monolithic power, that needs to be questioned or even removed from its pedestal. And this is not only the case for art but also for architecture, not only for individual artworks but for the institutions that contain them. From those convinced of the importance of sustainability, there is increasing suspicion – if not hostility – towards large-scale museums and monumental building projects, which are connected to the capitalist principal of ever-expanding growth. However, the real estate market, tourism industry and many major players of both private and corporate philanthropy remain seduced by the promise that bigger equals better, as we see from the rash of monumental museum-building projects currently underway across the world.
There is also an increasing fascination for large scale experiential art projects that we see proliferating internationally, with a particular focus on technology-driven exhibitions adapting the works of famous painters into immersive environments and inviting us to step into the world of artists such as Vincent Van Gogh or Frida Kahlo. While such projects can offer access and ways to explore the details of famous paintings we might never get to see in real life, they are also transformations of physical materials (usually paint on canvas) into oversized, dematerialised digital images. In a world already saturated with digital imagery, Bozar Monumental offers as a counterpoint an experience rooted in materiality and a direct, tangible encounter with physical sculpture on a grand scale. In this approach, it is comparable to Tate Modern’s commissions for the Turbine Hall (although on a scale befitting Brussels!) or to the series of exhibitions created for the central hall of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof.
How does monumental sculpture today differ from that of the past? Already in 2007, in the catalogue of the exhibition Unmonumental, Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum (New York) noted that there was a global trend in sculpture towards ‘the fragmentary and the contingent.’ She saw this as a reflection of the extreme delicacy and fragility of life at the start of the 21st century. ‘Just as artists almost a century ago expressed the rupture they were experiencing after World War I and then again after the detonation of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II, we too are facing a fractured and fast-changing world.’ Co-curator of Unmonumental, Richard Flood, wrote of a new attitude embraced by sculptors: ‘Extravagant gestures have given way to a handshake or a hug (maybe even a shrug). The best of the work defies a simple knee-jerk response because it tends to be conversational, it wants to slow the passerby down for a chat. The work is not about delivering last words or winning a debate but about questioning everything from its formal properties to its place in the world.’ The almost two decades that have passed since that exhibition have confirmed both the fragility of the world we live in and the prevalence of artistic practices that embrace this fragility, even when working on a monumental scale.
For 2025, Bozar has invited the German artist Michael Beutler, known for his ingenious installations that he creates with his own, specially-designed, hand-driven tools. Inventing new processes and often producing his own materials, Beutler makes engaging and playful works that speak to our imagination. A natural-born bricoleur, his architecturally-scaled works enable us to look at architecture in a new way. For Bozar, he creates a rotating, floating circular gate, occupying the central volume of the Horta Hall. His aim is to slow visitors down on their passage through this space, to invite them to linger a while. The public is also invited to interact with the work by entering inside it and turning it around them. This not only offers a shifting perspective upon the (fixed) surrounding architecture, but gives a simultaneous impression of stasis and movement.
For 2026, Bozar has invited artist the Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, known for her immersive installations that often comprise earth and spices. Drawing upon indigenous knowledge from her native country, she creates emotionally charged artworks that speak to visitors through many senses: sight but also smell. For Bozar, she is exploring new materials together with the Brussels-based architectural practice BC Materials. Morelos draws connections between traditional building forms here in Europe with those in South America, particular inspired by the constructions made by communities living in the Amazon.
For both these temporary, site-specific projects – and for those in the years to follow – Bozar places an emphasis on sustainable ideas and materials. Rather than shipping existing monumental artworks from around the world, we will bring people, ideas and local materials together to create new forms of fragile monumentality, to offer inspiration in our fragile times.
WHEN?
Friday, 27. June until Sunday, 31. August 2025
Opening hours:
Tue – Sun: 11 am – 7 pm
Closed on Mondays
WHERE?
Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
Ravenstein Street 23
1000 Brussels
Horta Hall
COST?
Free entry
