LEVEY KWOK
Opening: Saturday, October 31, 2026, 11:00 - 18:00
October 31 - December 19, 2026
Levey Kwok is pleased to announce Wet Conceptualism, a two-part exhibition proposing a new reading of Conceptual Art. Taking its title from a term coined by artist Warren Neidich, the exhibition asks what happens when an idea refuses to remain an idea.
The canonical accounts of Conceptual Art, from Sol LeWitt's instructions to Lucy Lippard's "dematerialization" of the object, describe the concept as independent of its material support: a proposition, a sentence, a system, tending toward a platonic ideal liberated from form. Yet throughout the past century, artists have made rigorously conceptual work that argues the opposite: that concepts are produced somewhere, by someone, in a body and a nervous system. Across mediums and subjects, these artists insist that thought cannot be separated from memory, sensation and desire, from language and labor, from institutions and technologies, or from histories of race, gender and power. These are the Wet Conceptualists: engaged, hot, emotional, vital, interrogating the messiness of life itself.
To name Wet Conceptualism is to imply a Dry Conceptualism, though the difference lies less in style than in where meaning is understood to reside. The dry model privileges linguistic clarity, systems, instructions and the dematerialized object; it is best understood as Conceptual Art's official account rather than its full practice. The wet model lets the material conditions around an idea enter the work itself, opening a space for thinking that is both critical and affective.
Dry Conceptualism took shape in opposition to a twentieth-century economy of mass-produced things and industrial labor. Wet Conceptualism comes into focus now, when attention, knowledge, memory and thought have themselves become forms of labor, resources to be extracted. Long subsumed by its dry counterpart, it is not a rejection of Conceptual Art but its rehydration: a vocabulary for revisiting the archive and for reading the art being made today.
Chapter I, opening in October 2026, maps the foundations of Wet Conceptualism across generations and geographies. It brings together Alighiero Boetti, Marcel Broodthaers, TR Ericsson, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, My Barbarian, Martha Rosler, Walter Swennen and Ria Verhaeghe, among others: artists who share neither a style nor a medium but arrive at the same conceptual territory by different routes. Chapter II, opening in March 2027, turns to perception, cognition, pharmacology and media, with Agnieszka Kurant, Hito Steyerl and Emmanuel Van der Auwera, among others.
Presented in Brussels, the two chapters also build toward a distinctly Belgian experience. Broodthaers, Swennen, Verhaeghe and Van der Auwera anchor the exhibition in a local lineage of conceptual thinking, placing it in conversation with international peers across a season rather than a single opening.
