Kris Burm is an internationally renowned author of abstract board games, whose GIPF project, among others, is acknowledged as a milestone in complex game design.

Burm is also the author of geometric and playful artworks that invite viewers to reconsider the relation between strategy games and art, and to explore the extent to which they overlap.

What happens if you look at an abstract game board as art? What is the object’s intrinsic value once stripped of its original functionality? Burm’s transitional works question this in-between space, first charted by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. For Kris Burm, however, games are the beginning of a process of increasing abstraction, which never loses sight of its ludic origins.

Kris Burm’s first comprehensive solo show in Antwerp, Abstract Moves brings together key works from the past twenty years – including a new large-scale commission for Tique. The exhibition is curated by Michaëlla Biesmans, Alicia Degreef, Sven Hollebeke, Lisa Philips and Eveline Van Look – Master students in Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Antwerp – in cooperation with Kris Burm and Antony Hudek, curator at M HKA.