When Art Takes the Metro
WHEN ART TAKES THE METRO... Get ready to take a unique journey into the heart of the largest underground art gallery in Brussels. This artistic route will take you on a journey of discovery of more than 90 works of art that have been adding the personal touch to the Brussels metro for more than 40 years. The fruit of the imagination and work of artists from various backgrounds, these works are unique thanks to their style, materials, volumes, the images they evoke and the atmosphere they create, like springboards for wandering spirits. In the early 1960s, when a metro project Its recommendations are submitted became a reality in Brussels, the designers to the Regional Minister for Mobility imagined this new underground and Public Works, who also proposes network as an open, lively and original artworks to be incorporated in the metro. environment where Art also needed a More than 90 works of art currently place. All the stations had to be different, decorate the platforms, mezzanines either by their design or by the nature of and corridors, and they breathe life into their finishing, while ensuring uniformity the 69 metro and pre-metro stations. in their decoration. As such, passengers All genres are represented: paintings, see a series of stations pass by, each with sculptures, photographs, stained glass, its own atmosphere and identity, in which etc., as well as all materials: from canvas they nonetheless find constant elements to bronze and from wood to glass, not that help them find their bearings. forgetting steel. Shortly before the first pre-metro stations Consciously or otherwise, tens of were commissioned at the end of 1969, thousands of passengers rub shoulders an Artistic Committee was set up.
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