In the quiet hours of June 14th, the art world bid farewell to an icon of conceptual subversion: Belgian installation artist Guillaume Bijl, who passed away at 79. A self-taught provocateur from Antwerp, Bijl was known for converting sterile galleries into vivid performances of everyday life—driving schools, supermarkets, mattress showrooms, atomic bomb shelters—rendering the mundane uncanny. His hyper-realistic decors and “extreme stereotypes” functioned as an archaeology of late capitalism, courting both alienation and comedic clarity.
Bijl’s early breakthrough was Autorijschool Z, staged in 1979 at Galerie Ruimte Z, where he literally converted a gallery into a driving school. With blackboards, seating, traffic signs, and engine models, the space was indistinguishable from a real classroom—until guests realized their surrounding art objects were sculptures in disguise. This deliberate “reality within unreality” became his signature, challenging art audiences by blurring authenticity and simulation.
Three artworks stand out as capstones in his oeuvre. First, Atomic Bomb Shelter (1985) confronted Cold War paranoia with chilling precision. Bijl recreated a fallout shelter within a gallery, complete with cots, canned goods, and survival protocols. The installation was a stark commentary on a society obsessed with preparedness yet refusing to confront its own self-destruction—humorless, tense, yet utterly compelling.
The second artwork, which is one of Guillaume Bijl’s most unforgettable environments, Matratzenland (2003), is a full-scale recreation of a discount mattress showroom—complete with promotional signage, red carpeting, stacked bedding, and impeccably staged “shoppers.” Installed at Kunsthalle Münster, the piece underscores the artist’s unique ability to collapse the distance between cultural critique and everyday banality. By mimicking commercial interiors with near-obsessive fidelity, Bijl transforms the gallery into a shrine of consumer exhaustion. The mannequins posed as tired patrons and floor attendants imbue the work with a deadpan theatricality, forcing the viewer to question whether they’ve stepped into an art space or a retail purgatory. It is precisely this friction—between the simulated and the real, the comic and the bleak—that makes Matratzenland such a quietly devastating commentary on modern life’s scripted performance.
Third, Sorry (2013–2023), in this haunting tableau from Guillaume Bijl’s Sorry series, a staged garden of mass-produced plaster statues is dramatically lit in tricolor hues—red, green, and yellow—casting deep shadows that animate the figures with theatrical gravitas. The faux-classical sculptures—ranging from kitschy cherubs to stoic hounds and mythological poses—are carefully arranged in a museum-like formation, parodying both the solemnity of cultural display and the disposable aesthetics of suburban decor. With typical Bijl wit, the piece pokes at the aspirations of middlebrow taste while evoking a strange, melancholic reverence—turning cheap sentimentality into an elegy for lost ideals.
Through six decades of quixotic realism, Bijl transmuted galleries into social theatres—driving schools, gyms, supermarkets, dog salons—each a reflection of our complicity with systemic narratives. His work remains a masterclass in visual critique: minimalist in alteration, maximalist in implication. Perhaps his greatest achievement was making us uncertain whether to laugh—or recoil—at the banalities we build. He leaned as much on tragicomedy as on archaeological precision; now, his precise absurdities stand as monuments to our own illusions.
Interview with Guillaume Bijl by Vernissage TV
