Didier Vermeiren's work has developed in a perpetual back-and-forth between past and present, between interpreting the history of sculpture and exploring its essential possibilities in the present. His first works, in the early 1970s, are situated at the crossroads of conceptual art, minimalism and the modern tradition of sculpture. Subsequently, the photographic documentation of his own work has become so important that it has become an integral part of his work and has led to the creation of works - photographic works - in their own right.
"Didier Vermeiren's sculpture is the place of subtle relationships woven between past and present, history and memory, matter and form, volume and space. From the base, considered static, he makes the point of departure and arrival of movement, that of a constant return to oneself, that of the relations between the works, that of the spectator whose attention is captured by a play of opposing forces. ( text by Catherine Elkar from the foreword of the catalogue of the exhibition Construction de distance, FRAC Bretagne, 2017). As for his photographs, it is in the museum and in the studio that Vermeiren takes them. "With sculpture photography, Vermeiren seizes, as he did with the pedestal, an element belonging to the work's mediation apparatus in order to record the confrontation of the sculpture with the reality of a place, with the neighbourhood of other sculptures, or with the reality of the production process." (excerpts from Michel Gauthier's text "Recherche de la base et du présent" in the catalogue Didier Vermeiren: Construction de distance, Frac Bretagne, Rennes, 2017.)
"My sculptures refer to the works of other sculptors, but also to my own" says Vermeiren. Thus the set of 9 photographs from 2015 showing one of the plaster casts of Etudes pour la Pierre, Mouvements 1 à 9 wrapped in tulle is part of a corpus of references: Auguste Rodin and his Cariatide à la pierre and Cariatide à l'urne , Carl André with Equivalent VII (1966) but also Vermeiren's own sculptures: L'Urne, 2009, La Pierre, 2012 the Etude pour la Pierre series from 2007 in wood and of course Etudes pour la Pierre, Mouvements 1 à 9, 2014.
Numerous museums and institutions have given him solo exhibitions, including the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Villa Arson in Nice in 1987, the Kunsthalle in Zurich and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1995, the Maison Rouge in Paris in 2012, and the Skulpturenpark Walfrieden in Wuppertal in 2012-2013. His latest solo exhibition, Construction de distance, in 2017 at the Frac Bretagne, was accompanied by the publication of a new catalogue.
Didier Vermeiren has also participated in several group exhibitions in international institutions (Moma in 1984, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987 and 1997, Grand Palais in 2017...) and represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1995. His works are present in numerous national and international public collections (notably the Tate in London, the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, the Hirshhorn museum in Washington...)
Didier Vermeiren was born in 1951 in Brussels, he lives and works between Paris and Brussels and has been teaching since 2002 at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany, and since 1991 at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.