Guillaume Bijl passed away in the morning of June 15th 2025.
He made his people see.
I got to know Guillaume Bijl in 1988. He needed a temporary atelier to have a sculpture made and I happened to rent a place he could use for some days.
The sculpture was to be the backside of a horse, which would be driven around in a horse trailer through the streets of Kapellen and Kalmthout, Belgium, during their “Beelden Buiten” arts festival that year.
When his assistant Philippe, an old friend of mine, finished the horse’s back end I had to drive the trailer around Kapellen while Guillaume and Philippe drove behind it to capture the scene on camera.
Some years later I became his assistant and his chauffeur, helping him, amongst others, during the production and set up of his works at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany and the Bienniale de Lyon in France and shows at Castello Di Rivoli in Turin, Italy and the Wiener Secession in Vienna, Austria.
He also started teaching - one day per week - at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands and a bit later at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, where he would be available for some days about once a month.
We spent a lot of time on the roads across Europe, often at night to avoid traffic, with Guillaume playing cassettes he bought at gas stations along the highways.
Guillaume also gave me great tips when I went to New York for the first time, telling me to go see Walter De Maria’s Earth Room and The Broken Kilometer at DIA Art Foundation, which I did, and I remain thankful to him for broadening my scope in life and art, as he did for many people.
These adventure lasted until about 1994, as I became romantically involved with someone in Vienna and subsequently spent most of my time in Austria.
Of course we kept seeing each other in bars and pubs and parties and openings in the years to follow. Guillaume remained a good friend and enjoyable company throughout the years, even acting as the deejay on my wedding party in 2014…
