Wouter Davidts: Writings & Projects

Wouter Davidts lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning and the Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies of Ghent University (UGent). There he recently established KB45, an interdisciplinary research group on art in Belgium since 1945 (KB45).

Photograph Ernst Davidts, July 2016

Between 2003 and 2008 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University, where he obtained a PhD on museum architecture in 2003. He was a British Academy research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London (2006), research fellow at the Research Group of Visual Arts, Academie voor Kunst en Vormgeving|St Joost, Avans Hogeschool (2007-2008), and a visiting research fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2008). From 2009 until 2012 he was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at VU University in Amsterdam.

In 2015 he has been awarded the Eduardo Chillida Professorship at the Art History Institute of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2016 he was a Visiting Fellow at ATCH (Architecture Theory Criticism History) research centre of the School of Architecture, University of Queensland, Brisbane.

He is the author of Triple Bond, a selection of essays on art, architecture and the museum (Valiz, 2017) and Bouwen voor de kunst? Museumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Modern (A&S/books, 2006). He has published on the museum, contemporary art and architecture in journals such as Afterall, Archis, De Witte Raaf, Footprint, Kritische Berichten, Metropolis M, OASE, Sculpture Journal and Parachute, and in books and exhibition catalogues. His exhibition reviews have appeared a.o. in Artforum, Camera Austria, Sculpture and OPEN.

Currently he is working on a book-length project on size and scale in postwar art, entitled Scale is Content, for which he received a 2015 Terra Foundation for American Art International Research Travel Grant.

He edited The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work (Valiz, 2009; with Kim Paice), CRACK: Koen van den Broek (Valiz, 2010), Luc Deleu – T.O.P. office: Orban Space (Valiz, 2012; with Guy Châtel & Stefaan Vervoort), Philippe Vandenberg: Absence Etc. (Hauser & Wirth Pubishers, 2017), and most recently, Trading Between Architecture and Art: Strategies and Practices of Exchange (Valiz, 2019; with Susan Holden and Ashley Paine).

He curated Philippe Van Snick. Undisclosed Recipients at BK SM in Mechelen (2006; with Hilde Van Gelder), Beginners & Begetters at Extra City in Antwerp (2007), Abstract USA 1958–1968. In the Galleries at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede (2010), Alentour in the Gallery Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerp (2012), Friends and Neighbors in the new studio space of Koen van den Broek (2013), Orban Space: Luc Deleu – T.O.P. office at Stroom Den Haag (2013; with Stefaan Vervoort) and Extra City Antwerp (2013; with Stefaan Vervoort), The Corner Show (2015, Extra City Antwerp; with Mihnea Mircan and Philip Metten), and After Scale Model: Dwelling in the Work of James Casebere (2016, BOZAR, Brussels), Round About or Inside (Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia, 2021; with Angela Goddard). Currently he is preparing an exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Brussels Palace of Fine Arts in 2022, entitel PROJECT PALACE: A CENTENARY.

contact: wouter.davidts@ugent.be