Art Brussels WEEK has modified its format to take place both on and offline, with tours running between 3 and 6 June 2021 at around 110 galleries across Brussels, Paris, Antwerp, and Knokke, and an OVR running between 1 and 14 June 2021. Ocula Advisory select their favourite works showing with this year's participating galleries.
Lisa Vlaemminck at rodolphe janssen
Lisa Vlaemminck graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent with an MFA in Painting in 2014, and now occupies a studio in Brussels overlooking the Botanical Gardens.
Inspired by the plantlife nearby, Vlaemminck brings fluorescent colours into recalibrated still lifes that verge on abstraction.
Resembling unicellular organisms shifting across the canvas, colourful forms sometimes merge with decorative materials, textiles, and objects that the artist amasses in her studio.
Mindy Shapero at Nino Mier Gallery
Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero creates extraordinary, layered paintings that come together as kaleidoscopic vortexes of colour.
Shapero's exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery marks the artist's first in Belgium, presenting 12 paintings that are referred to as 'scars', their surfaces the result of accumulations of stencils created using studio scraps, delicately overlaid with gold leaf.
Describing her work as 'a run on sentence', Shapero's paintings and sculptures often incorporate materials such as wire, dowls, paper, and beeds, which feed into their surfaces of infinite detail.
Bapiste Caccia at Super Dakota
Taking photographs as his starting point, Bapiste Caccia builds on large-scale images with acrylic, spray paint, and silk-screening techniques, transforming them into impactful reproductions through processes of repetition and saturation.
Graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Paris in 2013, the French artist today lives and works in Paris.
At Super Dakota in Ixelles, Brussels, the artist is included in a group exhibition alongside Paul McCarthy, Real Madrid, Baptiste Caccia, and Math Bass, among others, titled F#%k U & ur DisNey.
Linn Meyers at Jason Haam
Washington D.C.-based artist Linn Meyers takes a singular mark as her starting point, working outwards with lines and dots to create cool, illusory works mimicking movements in time and space.
The bottom right-hand corner in Untitled shows how Meyers' subtle technique creates the illusion of a delicate three-dimensional structure against a backdrop of large swathes of paint.
In September 2021, the artist will be included in the group exhibition Fields and Formations at Delaware Contemporary alongside Maren Hassinger, Jae Ko, Linling Lu, Maggie Michael, and Jo Small.
Cai Zebin at Super Dakota
Cai Zebin frequently reappropriates art historical paintings, absorbing them into his own fantastical narratives.
This cool and eerie acrylic work captures Zebin's imaginative response to the notion of storytelling. An unconventional colour palette spills across the picture plane, with a figure reading a book that has been replaced by the form of a giant moth.
The artist graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2012, and now lives and works in Shantou.
Belgian superstar Luc Tuymans was heralded as the saviour of painting 20 years ago when he represented his native country at the Venice Biennale.
His unique approach to figurative painting uses a range of sources to create images that have a nostalgic feel, in part due to their muted tones and often unconventionally cropped compositions.
Tuymans' use of light is overwhelming here, both reflecting and concealing the face of the subject, drawing the painting nearer to abstraction.
Main image: Exhibition view: Lisa Vlaemminck, Plastic roses never wither, rodolphe janssen, Brussels (20 April–20 May 2021). Courtesy rodolphe janssen. Photo: Eline Willaert.
