The Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl is specialized in installations. Bijl is an autodidact. He attended a theater course and initially worked as a stage builder and painter. From the second half of the seventies he began to create spatial objects and he researched alternatives for conceptual art. Bijl’s first installation (1979) was a driving school, set up in an Antwerp exhibition space, accompanied by a manifesto. It called for the abolition of art centers and their replacement by “institutions of social use”. In the eighties this installation was followed by a billiard room, a casino, laundry, a psychiatric clinic, an atomic bomb shelter, a congress of a new political party and a model of a Belgian country house. A more recent exhibition took place at the Berlin COMA.Bijl divides his work into four categories: “transformation installations”, “situation installations”, “compositions trouvées” and “sorry’s”. In 1992, Bijl was present at Documenta IX.
