Collectors
Veerle Swenters and Pierre Bogaerts

20 years ago we ended up in shoe business because of Veerle's father being a shoemaker in Antwerp. 2 years later we started the SONS project.
Collecting all the artists addresses was quite a challenge itself and then contacting them.
Writing over and over again, hours on the phone... it was a huge task. In no time we wrote over 1000 letters to the most famous artists: Arman, Baselitz, Fabre, Long, Panamarenko, Pistoletto, Richter, Wesselman etc...
Pretty soon we received positive reactions motivating us to continue this project. From the beginning many artists even transformed their shoes into an artwork.
Hence the title: "Shoes or no Shoes ?"
Are they real artworks or common shoes?
It's pleasant to ask this question to the visitors.
Many people like to ask us what our favourite object is and which artist we like the most. Actually we don't have a favourite because we consider the collection an entity and not individual contributions. That makes it hard to tell which object exactly is our number one.
Today Pierre and Veerle are still going on and they are even enriching the collection with authors (texts about shoes) and cartoonists (drawings).
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473
Bargoni Giancarlo
Italy
1993-09-22 -
121
Platschek Hans
Germany
1992-05-25 -
1605
Amm Markus
2016-09-16 -
1120
Beekman Tjebbe
Germany
2007-08-22 -
859
Lijn Liliane
Great Britain
1995-09-11 -
981
Chafes Rui
Portugal
2006-04-04 -
1344
Beckett James
Netherlands
2010-08-02 -
605
Smejkal Jan
Germany
1994-04-26 -
627
Eckart Christian
United States
1994-06-08 -
222
Schmidt Heins Gabriele
Germany
1992-10-19