page_title: Bart Cassiman
section_title: The Absent Museum
hierarchical_section_title: Bart Cassiman / The Absent Museum
caption_attribution_description: English: Jan Vercruysse &amp; René Daniëls - installation view: Espacio Mental, IVAM, Valencia (1991)
context_page_description: Bart Cassiman, freelance-curator, art critic and editor, is an art historian and studied press- and communication sciences at the Ghent University.
context_section_description: From 1989 until 2000 he was responsible for the BACOB bank collection of contemporary art. The collection contained at the end about 180 works of around 40 different international artists, a.o. Stan Douglas, Franz West, Herbert Brandl, Lili Dujourie, Cristina Iglesias, Thomas Schütte, Harald Klingelhöller, Allan McCollum, Narcisse Tordoir, Helmut Dorner, Luc Tuymans, Jan Fabre, Bazilebustamante, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Thierry De Cordier, James Welling, Juan Muñoz, Jan Vercruysse, Mitja Tušek, Gert Verhoeven, Stephen Wilks, Dianne Hagen, Jan Van Imschoot, Robert Suermondt, Carla Klein, Niek Kemps, Alicia Framis, Isa Genzken, Ebru Özseçen, Gregor Schneider, Valerie Mannaerts, Bjarne Melgaard, Mike Kelley, Carlos Amorales, Miroslav Balka.
  Due to a severe illness Bart Cassiman was forced to stop all his professional activities at the end of the nineties. Without any doubt one can say that he was one of the most active and energized persons of the artworld between the mid-eighties and the end of the nineties. With colleagues such as Saskia Bos, Ulrich Loock, Julian Heynen, Dennis Zacharopoulos and a few others he was responsible  for the visualization of a generation by making exhibitions and writing texts and convincing many museums and collectors to buy their works.
  The bank for which he collected more than a decade bought as a result of his engagement and advise the well-known Vanderborght building in the heart of Brussels, at the end of the nineties. Everything was prepared to open the first private (corporate) museum on this scale in Western Europe. The opening was planned for the spring of 2002. But because the engine of this whole operation fell silent the project died a quiet dead. Big parts of the collection were sold and so stays the capital of Europe deprived of an urgently needed Museum of Contemporary Art…
caption: Jan Vercruysse & René Daniëls - installation view: Espacio Mental, IVAM, Valencia (1991)
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