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Marianne Berenhaut

De Bon Cœur | De Bunker
Kunsthalle Recklinghausen

An Overlooked Pioneer of Conceptual Art

The daughter of Jewish parents, Marianne Berenhaut (b. Brussels, 1934; lives and works in Brussels and London) survived the war years in Belgium. Since the late 1960s, she has been making sculptural installations whose deft conjunction of historic gravitas and playful lightness is unparalleled. Her oeuvre, which remained undiscovered for many years, may fitly be compared to those of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), Christian Boltanski (1944–2021), or Emilia (b. 1945) and Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023). 

Based on the exhibition, the monograph De Bon Cœur | De Bunker is the first to showcase an overview of Berenhaut’s artistic output—including arrangements of objets trouvés, sketchbooks, and installations from the 1960s to the present day. The building of the exhibition venue, a former high-rise bunker from the Second World War, is itself like one of Berenhaut’s objects: a transformed container of stories of pain as a possibility of new beginnings. With essays by Nico Anklam, Michel Kolenberg, and Nadine Plateau.