Bootleg paintings

In the tradition of painting, copies and homages are an age-old phenomenon. Dieter Durinck, however, gives this classic trend an entirely new and personal interpretation in his Bootleg series. In his own way, Durinck here translates well-known and lesser-known works from the 20th century by repainting them in a combination of bright green and black oil paint.

This collection has since grown to 36 artworks by very different artists. In doing so, he not only pays homage to this art history but also questions how we come to know and experience these works today, as a reproduction rather than an original. Or in the words of John Berger: ‘the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction’ (Ways of Seeing 21).

Durinck himself chooses which works to include within the series, creating a very personal view of history. The no-holds-barred subjectivity of this particular art collection is further highlighted by Durinck’s toxic green glasses, which both refer to the similar green computer screens of the 1980s and remind them of the night-vision images typical of Gulf War I. It also unwittingly echoes Thomas Ruff’s famous series of night shots that refer to that same war.



Posture Editions N° 51 forms a retrospective of this meaningful collection of paintings and reflects on Durinck’s art history with texts by Simon Delobel, Céline Mathieu and Gabriela González Rondón and Alex Deforce.

In the book, Durinck combines the green-and-black paintings with grids he recovers from old transfer films from the pre-computer era or repetitive patterns he finds in objects and assembles into graphic backgrounds.