ANTWERP.- COUR presents 'An Angel’s Share', a new exhibition in collaboration with GUSCH DÜSSELDORF, on view in Antwerp from December 13, 2024 - January 19, 2025.

This living-room exhibition presents a collection of twenty-six objects that uncover the forgotten history held within the former hotel on the Groenplaats—something we might call the ‘angel’s share.’ It’s a collector’s dream in more ways than one. As it turns out, with every little death, a little afterlife gets its wings.

Works by Ron Arad, Gaetano Pesce, Otto Zapf, Ingo Maurer, Stefan Bumm, Rich Aybar (RAWORKSHOP), Simon Ertl (Ertlundzull), Adeline Halot, Fritz Adamski, Ludovicus Van Beek, Giseok Kim & Noir Métal.

While pulling a filer à l’anglaise can seem like a biased attempt to rebrand the French exit into something a little less, well, French, it’s worth noting that the French exit was rebutted by the English trying to shift the blame back across shores. Despite the French being the first to lay a glove in painting the English as ‘boorish runaways,’ French it would remain. It just happens to be a better fit. If anything, an English person tends to outstay their welcome.

Politics aside, don’t feel bad about sticking around and reading on. It’ll be worth it. After all, it’s exactly how the French would have wanted it. And since any of their euphemisms practically beg to be read as something vaguely risqué, consider this: to leave isn’t to vanish—it’s to persist in a different form.

Each year around two percent of whiskey gets lost to evaporation during the cask maturation process—a loss some corny distiller named ‘the angel’s share.’ From the barrels, the aromas of the aged spirit find their way into the air, ghosting past your sinuses, beyond olfactory appeal. The thing is that whiskey shouldn’t hold a monopoly on this kind of theology. What if everything that exists or that is lost to us, an angel has their share of?

Beer burps? The angel’s share of your IPA. Phantom pains? The angel’s share of an amputee. Climate catastrophe? An angel’s tax on your beachside real estate. And it’s not just cause and effect —it’s something far stranger. It’s the afterlife of things we’ve convinced ourselves are gone for good. Think about it, if every thought survives its thinker, and every ‘moment’ overstays their welcome à l’anglaise, then maybe the real horror isn’t loss itself but the awkward presence of everything we thought we’d left behind.

Now, driven by the momentum of every stray thought caught up in its hilarious manifestations, what follows are fragments of what angels were left with—or, better yet, the stories of what survived them. Each tale reeks of its time, its place, and its excess. Here lies the forgotten orientalist pulp of the Groenplaats, clinging on for dear life to Antwerp’s little heart.

Text by Stan Van Rompaey