With Its Walls, Floors, Ceiling and Windows, artist Richard Venlet transforms Bozar’s ‘antichambres’ into a space that highlights the culture of exhibition-making. In his engagement with Victor Horta’s spatial presence within the museum, Venlet immediately sets a new standard for architectural interventions in historic buildings.

As early as 1990, Venlet explored the distance between the artwork and the visitor at Bozar, a distance that Horta had established from the outset with a marble strip on the floor of the Centre for Fine Arts. On the dividing line between the marble and the herringbone parquet, Venlet placed a wooden wall from which an object was suspended. The question he thus posed was what exactly was being ‘exhibited’. The object, the wall and the space became so intertwined that the work itself transcended the artist’s intervention. The (dis)connection between (other people’s) artworks and the exhibition space became Venlet’s constant field of research.