Didier Vermeiren was born in Brussels in 1951, where he continues to live and work. Vermeiren is considered an artist's artist in the way he has influenced as mentor and teacher artists such as Thomas Houseago, Urs Fischer and Matt Monahan. His work explores sculpture in the context of space: within the artist's studio, in a photograph, and with the formal placement on plinths or pedestals.
Vermeiren represented Belgium at the Venice Biennial in 1995 and has shown his work at the Kunsthalle, Zürich, Germany, the Galerie Nationale Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, the Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium, and the Artist Space in New York. He teaches at De Ateliers in the Netherlands and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. Didier Vermeiren was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1951 and still lives and works there.
Didier Vermeiren belongs to a generation of artists who, since the 1970s, has been drawing on the legacy of conceptual art and minimalism. Vermeiren has been occupied with the history and specific nature of sculpture since the 1970s, more specifically the plinth. The fraught relationship between sculpture and pedestal is often viewed as a metaphor for the correlation of sculpture and reality – with Vermeiren subscribing to Brancusi’s belief that the plinth is integral to the work.