Pirelli HangarBicocca presents from 6 April to 30 July 2023 "Grand Bal", the retrospective exhibition dedicated to Ann Veronica Janssens, one of the most important Belgian artists at an international level. In his 40-year career, Janssens has experimented with the elusive and forged light, his favorite material, investigating the sensorial and performative nature of spaces and architectures, giving life to changing and evolving works.

The artist's interventions are the result of a research on the border between art and science and investigate the perceptive and psychic limits of the human being like real laboratories.

"Grand Bal" is conceived as an extensive choreography that combines environmental installations with more intimate works, tracing a visual, sound and tactile path that invites you to move between the incorporeal and the tangible, between surreal atmospheres and references to socio-political contexts and culture of our contemporaneity.

Since the late seventies Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, United Kingdom, 1956; lives and works in Brussels) has developed her research around light and its relationship with the surrounding environment, often creating site-specific works that challenge immutable character of sculpture and installation. Often associated with the work of “Light & Space” – the group of American artists of the 1960s such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell – Janssens has structured her practice around the overcoming of the artistic object through its dematerialization and deconstruction. In fact, with minimal forms and gestures with an anti-monumental character, Janssens is able to change the perception of space by the public. His works, thanks to the use of light, colour, mirrors, air or artificial fog, require the direct participation of the observer and appear as an invitation to experience reality in a different way through an awareness of one's own senses, of architecture and of the spatio-temporal categories with which we define it, highlighting its socio-political and cultural aspects. Often based on experiments in collaboration with scientific and technological realities, the artist's works become laboratories in which to test the boundaries between properties and physical-material elements, considered opposites: such as light and darkness, sound and silence, the emptiness and presence, the tangible and the incorporeal.