Artwork of the month - video (1 min).

WITBOEK

Year	2025
Size	A5 (14.8 cm x 21 cm) - 150 pages
Materials	Ink, pencil, ballpoint pen and coloured markers on 200gr. Steinbach paper
Edition	1/1
For Sale	No
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A book can be many things. It can carry a story, preserve a memory, transmit knowledge, be used as a portal, or simply sit quietly on a shelf. But what happens when the book itself becomes the artwork? For WITBOEK, an exhibition project curated by Bruno Devos and Frederik Vergaert, fifty artists were invited to create fifty unique book objects. The project opened at Fred&Ferry in Antwerp in September 2025, before continuing as a travelling project in which the books leave the gallery and encounter new contexts, audiences and places.

For Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert, the invitation resulted in a book that is perhaps best understood not as a publication, but as a small portable and associative universe.

Their WITBOEK brings together associative drawings connected to dreams, earlier artworks, fragments of their shared artistic mythology, and drawings made together (and sometimes with their children). There is no single narrative running through the pages. Instead, images appear, disappear and reappear in unexpected combinations. A symbol from an earlier artwork can suddenly sit next to a drawing of a dream; an associative drawing can connect with one of the duo's alter egos; a visual fragment can be linked to ancient cuneiform and much much more. Every page in the book is a discovery.

This holistic way of working is deeply embedded in the artistic practice of Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert. Throughout their oeuvre, the two artists have developed a visual language in which symbols, rituals, objects, alter egos and recurring characters constantly migrate from one work into another. Their practice moves freely between performance, sculpture, drawing, installation, theatre and digital environments. Rather than treating these disciplines as separate territories, they use them as different ways of entering the same imaginative landscape. The book therefore becomes a kind of map of this landscape and while leafing through it, one travels through the oeuvre of the duo.

Instead of presenting finished artworks, it opens the door onto the territory where artworks begin: the unfinished image, the half-remembered dream, the strange association, the image that appears without explanation.

In that sense, the book becomes both an archive and a playground. It documents the artistic process, and at the same time it generates meaning. WITBOEK approaches the book not as a container for art, but as an artistic medium in its own right. Its curatorial framework traces a lineage from experimental artists' books by figures such as Dieter Roth and Marcel Broodthaers to contemporary artists who use the book as an autonomous object, a space for experimentation and a way of challenging the conventional boundaries of art.

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