Hugo Heyrman - Chair with Pick-up, Chair with Pudding, 1966

In a climate determined both by Provo and by Pop and Fluxus, Hugo Heyrman (°1942, Antwerpen), together with Panamarenko, Bernd Lohaus and Wout Vercammen, formed a loose group which startled the phlegmatic seaport of Antwerp with happenings that undermined the mouldering artistic and social institutions in a manner that was at once serious and frivolous. In 1966 Hugo Heyrman worked closely with Panamarenko. The duo called itself "Happy Spacemaker" and "Multimillionaire" respectively. They published the magazine Happening News, collaborated on Panamarenko’s pinup dolls and showed their work together at the Wide White Space gallery under the remarkable title, "The Première of the Brain Expansion in Colour!".

The "Chairs" are humorous, almost surrealistic sculptures which Hugo Heyrman showed at the very first exhibition at Wide White Space. Like Panamarenko, he takes a subject from everyday reality and experiments with unexpected materials and so violates the traditional concepts of sculpture. Heyrman models his chairs from seaweed. This organic, fragile and insubstantial material is entirely out of keeping with our idea of a chair. The lopsided object is not only comic, but above all a poetical, pictorial and very tactile sculpture.


—Hans Martens
Middelheim, 1997