Thomas Lerooy
(Roeselare,
1981 )
With macabre nimbleness and imagination tending toward the absurd, Thomas Lerooy thematizes the transitory and the timeless, decisiveness and resignation, sense and nonsense of life. In drawings, paintings and bronze sculptures, he establishes new connections, misleading or otherwise, between seventeenth-century vanitas symbols, fragments from art history and everyday objects: putti with golden skulls in scabrous poses, a woman's torso in a urinal or a dead bird in a broken ball, classical sculptures held together with adhesive tape ... Lerooy perpetuates the fragile beauty, fallibility and futile vanity of man and the inescapable cycle of life and death, in short the unbearable lightness of existence. He exhibited solo at venues including the Petit Palais in Paris, the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. In 2020, he placed on the seawall in Knokke a 22-meter-high sculpture with 49 stacked bronze heads looking toward the sea.
