Guillaume Bijl: Recente Sorry’s

Belgian surrealist Guillaume Bijl returns to Lumen Travo Gallery for a special solo exhibition, Recente Sorry’s, during Amsterdam Art Week 2025. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 22 May, between 17:00 and 21:00, during Festive Gallery Night!

Guillaume Bijl (b. 1946, Antwerp) is known for his large-scale installations and visual realism. Since the late 1970s, Bijl has created realistic decors using found objects, pioneering a resurgence of the readymade. Bijl presents the public with various aspects of our Western 'civilisation' and consumer society. Through extreme stereotypes, he crafts a tragicomic, alienating kind of 'archaeology of our time'.

His “Recente Sorry’s” presented at Lumen Travo Gallery take various forms. They are compositions of objects or installations featuring an absurd element that shifts them out of reality and into the surreal.

“The word 'sorry' is a prototypical, cool word of our time. When I began putting together a series of absurd assemblages of existing objects in 1987, creating an abstraction in this way, I was being 'unfaithful' to my own realistic form. That is why I called these small works 'sorries'.

Later, I also made a number of larger, absurd installations, in which I consistently insinuated the human figure into a surreal tableau. These works became an absurdly poetic extension of my oeuvre.”

• Guillaume Bijl, 1991

Visit Lumen Travo Gallery and admire Guillaume's artworks