Ensemble

In various ways, the ICC played an important part in forming the potential of the collection. Flor Bex aspired to establish a museum in Antwerp and made an attempt in relation to Office Baroque, the project that the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark carried out in 1977, shortly before he died. He failed in this, but, by means of donations from artists, a collection was assembled that formed the basis for the M HKA collection when that museum was established. The basis of the M HKA collection thus emerged from the ICC period via the Stichting Gordon Matta-Clark. This collection, put together with no predetermined substantive strategy, consisted of about 170 works of varying quality, and presents a picture of the Belgian and international avant-garde of the 1970s, with forerunners of and offshoots in the 1980s. This sub-collection consists of a collection of artworks typical of the 1970s, with only a few big names, analytically-inspired interventions, fundamental and analytical research into pictorial qualities. The Foundation possessed a lot of work by Belgian artists: an installation by Jacques Lizène, a mountain landscape in felt by Hugo Heyrman, mail art by Johan van Geluwe, work by Wout Vercammen, Denmark’s Bois de Moniteur belge, design drawings by Luc Deleu and Leo Copers’ installation Flying Knives. Among the foreign artists were Gordon Matta-Clark, with a Cibachrome, a series of artist books by Ed Ruscha, an early neon sculpture by Maurizio Nannucci, and James Lee Byars’ The shadow of an extra-terrestrial Man, also called ‘the Antwerp Giant’.