The exhibition Soleil Politique, organised by the M HKA, is the first retrospective of the Belgian key artist Marcel Broodthaers in his own country for a decade. In recent years, Broodthaers' work has been on display in top museums as part of a travelling exhibition, organised by the MoMA and the Museo Reina Sofía. The M HKA however, consciously chooses to present this body of work as a project in its own right, just as it did before with artists Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars. Soleil Politique focusses on Marcel Broodthaers from an Antwerp perspective, linked to Wide White Space Gallery. The exhibition aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the breadth of themes, media and presentation strategies Broodthaers engaged with. It will present, for the first time ever in our country, Decor: A conquest by Marcel Broodthaers (1975), a more than generous loan from the V – A – C Foundation in Moscow. At the same time, the exhibition presents rarely exhibited works and documents that were discovered during the preliminary research.

Soleil Politique approaches Broodthaers' oeuvre from the idea that art is always political, and that politics are tantamount to constant negotiation without ever reaching a final conclusion. This approach to complexity is initiated when, in around 1967, Broodthaers allows this concept to affect his visual work and presents words or text in different contexts. His first exhibition in which words, objects and various forms of printing are brought together in an ensemble was Le Corbeau et le Renard (The Fox and the Crow) (1968). It was presented at the Wide White Space Gallery, where he organised a number of important exhibitions from 1966 to 1974. The gallery also presented its artists at the Kunstmarkt in Cologne. His work Musée d'art Moderne, Département des Aigles came to Antwerp in 1969, where he installed Section XVIIe Siècle in the art space A 37 90 89.