The Belgian artist Maria Degrève has occupied a particular place in the world of performance art from the end of the 1980s and 90s until the present day. During the mid-1980s, after completing her training in art and philosophy, Degrève spent two years in New York. Here, in an approach similar to other female artists such as Francesca Woodman, Claude Cahun, Ana Mendietta and Cindy Sherman, she used her own body as an artistic medium to experience and capture (via photography and video) the continually changing and shifting nature of identity. With carefully selected examples of her work, the 'Merry Go Round' exhibition highlights the great diversity and different levels of Degrève's art and the coherence between its various phases (1984-2018). She took this degree with a dissertation on Maria Degrève: Hoe bevraagt een kunstenares, in casu Maria Degrève, vrouwelijkheid in haar oeuvre?
Regina Van Landuyt graduated from Ghent University as a Master of Arts in Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies in 2015. She took this degree with a dissertation on Maria Degrève: Hoe bevraagt een kunstenares, in casu Maria Degrève, vrouwelijkheid in haar oeuvre?
Maria Degrève is a visual artist using different media: painting, video, photography, performance and installation. Her work deals with the dualities between public and private, and with the mutability and volatility of the border between the two. In what she calls her 'metamorphoses' she explores the theme of identity. She questions the idea of femininity and creates 'individual mythologies', through engagement with the intimate, the autobiographic and the introspective.
The work of Maria Degrève is indebted to the performance art of the early 1970s. The artist regards her oeuvre not as a succession of completed works, but as a continuum based around the central concepts of metamorphosis and pattern.
TRIAGE is a temporary collaborative project initiated in Ghent by three photographers : Maria Degrève, Lieve D’hondt and Freya Maes, during July 2020. Each one of her has an individual practice, multidisciplinary for Maria Degrève and Lieve D’hondt and photography for Freya Maes, but they know each other for long time and regularly exchange about their experiences within the cultural scene.