De Stadscollectie Antwerpen is a lively tribute to the artists who give colour to the city of Antwerp. From emerging talent to established names, this collection highlights local creativity but also the global influence of Antwerp’s art scene. Welcome!

Nadia Naveau

(c)image: Nadia Naveau
A Random Sample, 2012
Sculpture , 390 x 285 x 180 cm
ceramic, epoxy, wood, sandpaper, clay, plasticine, paper, polyester, iron, plexi

In the three-dimensional collage A Random Sample we recognise her composite, eclectic and multiform method, which does not disappear as a result of being transformed into clay and cast in a single material. The work as a whole is made up of boxes, baking trays, a slab of expanded polystyrene, sculptures in clay, Plastiline, epoxy, terracotta and ceramics, colour and glaze tests, perforated planks, English sweets (Liquorice Allsorts), framed collages with sandpaper, and numerous other things left over from Naveau’s sculptural activities, pushed aside, rejected for the time being, waiting in purgatory for approval to exist officially. Here and there we see the birth of a figure, lost in the ruins of the Hessenhuis, such as Yves Klein’s imprints of women or Hugo Heyrmans and Panamarenko’s Feltra, which came into being eight years after 1958. It’s odd how fashions change, how some approaches can fall out of grace and then come back into acceptance again. History is an inextricable tangle of forms and ideas, in which our experiences with the works form the only reality. (Hans Theys, 2012)