About Phoenix Gallery
Phoenix gallery & art-project is intending to promote contemporary art in Belgium and abroad.
Initially the gallery was founded in 1980. Since several years the gallery has added a number of significant artists with an international reputation who are ambitious, challenging and intellectually driven with works in diverse practices and mediums, such as photography, video, installations, paintings and sculptures.
Klaus Prior
Prior Klaus was born in Wesel (Germany) and moved to Switzerland in l964 where his artistic career was influenced by the new revolutionary wave of the previous century.
A few years after Klaus Prior had acquired his Swiss citizenship in l989 he created his first sculptures. From then onwards a great number of his works are to be found all over the world.
Typical for his sculptures is that they are monumental, that their shape is archaic, that the surface structure is expressive and that their contrasts are intensive.
Klaus Prior’s figures reflect unfiltered intuitive experiences and appear as three-dimensional sketches that have intentionally been carved from massive trunks into gigantic human figures with the chain saw and the chisel
Prior’s major theme is the stateless, the expelled, the homeless, waiting, unconscious of their destination, the refugees and the victims, who despite their situation still treasure their pride and values.
All of his paintings and sculptures are created spontaneously without a preparatory study and thus are the most individual expression of the most individual emotion.
His sculptures are almost anti-monuments and question the aesthetic prescriptions and functions of the creation of sculptures in general.
His paintings have not been submitted to any form of aesthetic restrictions and give the impression of total freedom of expression.
