Gallery as an aquarium
But Pierre Mertens seldom exhibits in a gallery and he used this new context for new work. Gallery 121 was located in Mechelsesteenweg, a busy shopping street in Antwerp. where the boutiques really work on their image and want to look exclusive.
He stacked all his unused canvases into a sculpture with the “stop painting” title and made an intervention in the architecture of the building.
He collected the stylish shopping bags in the boutiques, painted them over and filled them with old clothes and placed them in a large spiral in the gallery.
He placed fish against the windows of the gallery as if the gallery were an aquarium. The fish looked out for bird nests on the other side of the street. With text and three masks he made the word image-ideo-logic a combination of image and ideology. He completely painted three mirrors in the shape of a circle, a square and a triangle.
