When the Belgian city of Ghent set up its contemporary art museum in 1975, founding curator Jan Hoet blew the whole first year’s budget on a single artwork called Deltavliettuig P-1 Piewan, a model of an imaginary delta-wing plane. The artist was Panamarenko, who died in 2019 and would have been 85 this year. With an almost cult status in Belgium and a history of international exhibitions that have included New York’s MoMA and London’s Hayward Gallery, he is best known for his fantasy flying machines and mechanical animals. These are respectively the subject of two major exhibitions — Journey To The Stars in Antwerp’s contemporary art museum M HKA, and Zoo aan Zee (Seaside Zoo) at the Cultural Centre Scharpoord in the posh seaside town of Knokke-Heist. They are at the heart of the Panamarenko85 program, and so extraordinary, they’re worth a trip to Belgium to see!
Panamarenko was raised in Antwerp, and attended the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1950s, although he wasn’t often there. He layered his paintings from this time so thickly, they seemed to be trying to reach the third dimension. Two are on show in the Zoo aan Zee exhibition. In the early 60s, as political activism boiled up in the US and Europe, Panamarenko started staging conceptual-performative ‘happenings’ with Hugo Heyrman in Antwerp streets, but the police cracked down on them. In 1965, Panamarenko started making montages from newspaper pictures, text and ads, published as the Happening News. They’re funny and are included in both the Antwerp and Knokke current shows. The next year, Antwerp’s new Wide White Space Gallery hosted his and Heyrman’s happenings, where performance and exhibition resonated with the new sensation of American Pop Art. Panamarenko became a showman at these events, and for one dressed in a white suit, claimed to be a millionaire, and invented his name. In the last show in 1967, he shot a cauldron of hot chicken soup with a gun.
Simultaneously, a completely different approach to Panamarenko’s creations began to emerge, which bridged mechanical engineering and art. One of his Happening News collages had reproduced an advertising image of a bicycle, and in 1967, he fabricated a sculpture based on it, Zwitserse Fiets (Swiss Bicycle). He had become friends with Joseph Beuys, who shared an interest in both expanding the idea of what art could be, and in science. In 1968, Beuys invited him to exhibit at the internationally significant Kunstakadamie, Düsseldorf. Panamaremko offered the installation Das Flugzeug (The Aircraft), a spindly flying machine with a bicycle seat from which two sets of turning sails could be powered to provide lift like a helicopter. It was 16m long and 7m wide, it had echoes of da Vinci and Wright Brothers-era flying machines, but it never flew. This functional invention was an artwork. Subsequent works would include the iconic The Aeromodeller (1971), a 27m-long zeppelin which almost flew from Antwerp to Arnhem, but the weather was bad.
Panamarenko’s flights of fancy extended into the cosmos, and this is the subject of the exhibition Journey to the Stars. In his very first Happening collage, he had asked: ‘Sculptors and scholars, who knows anything about the stars? Who can commune with the universe?’ At first glance, with its electrical mechanisms, technical drawings, photographs, research material, prototypes and spacecraft, the show feels like it belongs in a science museum. ‘He used science as a resource’, comments curator Piet Van Hecke. We see material which inspired Panamarenko, like 50s and 60s sci-fi graphic novels, including the Tintin book Explorers on the Moon by Hergé. He developed scientific ideas, such as anticipating magnetic fields for propulsion, but his concept came from wondering how UFOs could be powered. We see his Flying Cigar Called Flying Tiger (1980), comprising tubes like a mutated carburetor exhaust — he imagined it could be the basis of an 800m-long populated spaceship. As for the spacecraft, they never left the ground and, like the earlier Flugzeug, were always presented as artworks. The highlight at M HKA is the huge flying saucer Bing of the Ferro Lusto (1997), seven metres across its fibreglass form and with its ‘Bing’ engines visible as. Floppy, translucent, even unintentionally suggesting an angel’s head with halo, it looks genuinely otherworldly.
In addition to the show, M HKA also gives us a glimpse of Paramenko’s Antwerp home studio, via a wide wall-screen about two metres high, where you can scroll the view by touch. It reveals a space of eclectic objects from a diving helmet to a boot sculpture he created for his mother’s shoe business, and you see his chaotic, battered old desk. It feels bohemian. The real studio, once an apartment, is actually preserved and can be visited by arrangement.
Last but not least in Antwerp, something amazing hangs in the imposing neo-classical lobby of the KMSKA (Royal Museum of Fine Arts) — Panamarenko’s restored Magic Carpet, made for the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. This rectangular work, articulated like a Japanese screen, carries an array of fans in circles to provide lift, and is trimmed with tassels like a middle eastern carpet. You can even spot a label tag hanging from a corner, as if it was on sale in a souk. This magically whimsical work may be Panamarenko’s most elegant, and is available as a Panamarenko Foundation-edited limited edition.
The big show Zoo aan Zee is about Panamarenko’s interest in animals. His connection with them started when his family happily shared a house with animals — they once took a jackdaw with them on a holiday to France. Later, like his aircraft and spacecraft works, he fabricated animal-based works that were not simply zoomorphic but came from meticulous design studies. This output spanned decades and much of it is on show, again demonstrating his trademark synthesis of left-field ideas and an intense, technical approach. A series called Umbilly (umbilical chord) exploited the dynamics of flapping wings. Umbilly 1 (1976) is a 4.4m-wingspan plane with beating wings on its tail, driven by pedalling inside its central cabin. In the 1990s, he produced mounted mechanical insects with beautifully coloured transparent wings, such as Umbilly Ritz (1997). We see his aluminium insect-leg based robotic Knikkerbbeen (Crooked legs) from 1990, and pictures of him sitting on it, but he admitted he didn’t dare to ride them on a powered walk. He became interested in the 150 million year-old species archaeopteryx, long considered the first bird. We see documentation of his expedition to the Amazon to find a hoatzin bird, thought to be closely related. He was appalled when his guide brought one to him, freshly shot. When he started building a mechanical archaeopteryx in 1990, it was intended to learn, a hopeless idea when deep learning was yet to emerge from neural networks.
Earlier animal representations were less ambitious but more charming. One of Zoo aan Zee’s exhibits is Meikever (1975), a maybug beetle with stars on its wings, housed in a carrying case. A film clip of Panamarenko demonstrating it shows it actually lifted off. Even earlier, in his Embry Riddle montage (1965), a cute cat and an ominous warthog make an appearance.
Like the technical drawings of da Vinci (with whom Panamarenko always rejected comparisons), his projects rarely delivered their functional promises, but exist as unique and remarkable art. Although accepted at the forefront of the Belgian avant-garde in the 60s, Panamarenko was ambiguous about his position as artist. His contribution to a 1986 show organised across private houses in Ghent mocked the idea of a vital Flemish art elite that Jan Hoet promoted. Object comprised bundles of money in a birdcage next to a box of bills, and Panamarenko made a show of sitting beside it at a table eating oysters with the artist Jef Geys. Hoet was infuriated.
Panamarenko’s school-boyish interest in sci-fi morphed into a serious lifetime obsession with science, and combined with exceptional maker skills, they define his career and reputation. Somehow, from the radical conceptualist tides of the 60s, he opened up his own creative territory somewhere between physics, natural history, ufology and engineering. The Panamarenko85 shows in Antwerp and Knokke-Heist are fascinating journeys through his epic, incomparable output. His last work is in a lake next to the Scharpoord Cultural Centre. Wuivende Krabben is an installation of waving crabs on silver domes rising from the water, made in 2011 after he’d retired. The crabs seem to be playing around, having fun — it’s a happy finale to Panamarenko’s legacy.
Journey to the Stars is at M HKA, Antwerp until 7th September
Panamarenko’s Zoo aan Zee is at Cultural Centre Scharpoord, Knokke until 24th August
Magic Carpet is at KMSKA, Antwerp until 9th Septemeber
Wuivende Krabben is permanently installed in the Zegemeer, Knokke
