Jos De Gruyter

Jos de Gruyter (b. 1965, Geel) and Harald Thys (b. 1966, Wilrijk) are Belgian artists who have worked together since the late 1980s, making films, drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures populated by a recurring cast of mute, pallid, faintly menacing figures. Based in Brussels, they construct a deadpan world that looks at once instantly recognizable and subtly wrong — a flattened version of everyday European life in which routine, boredom, and dysfunction take on an uncanny charge. Their work belongs to a strain of contemporary art that mines the banal and the amateurish for unease rather than spectacle.

The duo first became known for low-budget videos in which expressionless characters perform halting, repetitive actions against bare backgrounds, the deliberate crudeness of the medium sharpening the sense of estrangement. Sculpture and installation later brought their figures into three dimensions as mannequins and automatons — bodies frozen or jerking through small, futile tasks. Humor runs throughout, but it is humor shadowed by menace and melancholy. These concerns reached their fullest form in Mondo Cane, their project for the Belgian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), curated by Anne-Claire Schmitz: a mock folkloric museum in which silent artisans ply traditional trades while, behind steel bars in the adjoining rooms, a population of outcasts and lunatics is confined — a portrait of a society turned in on itself, mistaking tradition for refuge.

Their work has been shown at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2019) and the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008), with institutional solo exhibitions including Fine Arts at MoMA PS1, Das Wunder des Lebens at Kunsthalle Wien, Optimundus at M HKA in Antwerp, and White Suprematism at Portikus in Frankfurt. Working against the grain of polish and grandeur, de Gruyter and Thys have turned the dull and the dysfunctional into a sharp instrument for examining contemporary society and its anxieties.