Mike Bourscheid

Dos espinilleras de barro con adornos
34 x 14 cm

Sin Título (2018)
Espinillera de barro con adornos
34 x 14 cm

Mike Bourscheid, born in 1984 in Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), studied at the Université d’Aix-Marseille (France) and Universität der Künste Berlin (Germany).
Today, he lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Recent exhibitions include: Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), Nanaimo Art Gallery (Canada), Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (USA) and inSitu (Germany).
He represented Luxembourg at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
Mike Bourscheid’s sculpture- and performance-based practice, which often involves his fabrication of ungainly appendages and prosthetics, channels alternate, often gender-fluid personae and abject humour as devices for exploring aspects of his own Luxeumbourgian heritage, as well as the absurdities of normative masculine expression and patriarchal power. In Bourscheid’s performances, these “costume-objects” often become actors in their own right, functioning simultaneously as “ritualistic semaphores and as theatrical props. Much of Bourscheid’s work reveals the actions and accoutrement of these characters to be uncomfortably out of step with their environment. The artist’s process of learning the eccentric suite of skills necessary to produce his work – from pattern making to baking to copper soldering – is a fundamental part of his practice, and an important means for him to query and confound stereotypes of masculine and feminine labour (which he observed early on in his own parents’ separation of skills – his mother was a seamstress and his father a welder).