Leo Gabin

Contemporary American culture fascinates Belgian art collective Leo Gabin (Lieven Deconinck, Gaëtan Begerem, and Robin De Vooght). They watch it from afar and respond like a DJ — sampling, mixing, and reinterpreting existing tropes to create something entirely new. And, like the rest of us, Leo Gabin gets much of their information about America from the internet, an endless repository of content, both meaningful and meaningless. They gravitate toward user-generated material, searching for images and footage that individuals make themselves and post to share lives, ideas, and ideals. In a sense, Leo Gabin search for content that reveals America revealing itself. When they give this back to us, re-orchestrated as paintings, they present us with our own self-image, refracted through a particular collective sensibility. Harking back to the masters of transmuting found American images as art, Rauschenberg and Warhol, Leo Gabin’s paintings offer a dispassionate yet critical assessment of identity, authorship, and meaning.