Opening Friday 28 March, 6pm
March 29 – September 21, 2025
Konschthal Esch
29 boulevard Prince Henri
L-4280 Esch-sur-Alzette
Parabel vom Wasserbecken is the title of an unfinished book project by the Luxembourg artist Bert Theis (1952–2016), dating from 1986, recently rediscovered in his archives and transformed into a publishing project.
This series of collages is emblematic of the artist’s work in the 1980s. Based on the text The Parable of the Water Tank by the American author Edward Bellamy (1816–1886), this series is a satire on capitalism taken from his utopian novel Equality (1897), which was a great success in militant socialist and anarchist circles at the time. Presented in an archive binder and organized into eleven chapters, the collages enter into dialogue with extracts from the text.
In addition, the exhibition at Konschthal Esch presents all the collages produced by Bert Theis over the decades, bringing to light many previously unpublished materials. But above all, the exhibition is based on the question: What is a collage, really? What does it mean, also historically, to work with collage? Isn’t it a space of impurity and contamination? Isn’t it really a matter of pasting press clippings from outside the studio, from the street, from outside the places reserved for art? Can’t we imagine a three-dimensional collage—one that extends into existential space?
This is how we should view Bert Theis’s famous Plateformes and his Isola Art Center project in Milan: a great social collage. For Bert Theis, collage is not simply a formal technique but rather a conceptual paradigm.
Curated by Marco Scotini and Charlotte Masse
In collaboration with the Bert Theis Archive
