'It was overnight. It was like an epiphany. All of a sudden I knew I had to paint.'
Michaël Borremans didn't train as a painter, but a draughtsman and engraver at Saint Lucas in Ghent. It wasn't until the age of 33 that he picked up a paintbrush, which is late in an industry where artists are plucked by galleries before they've left art school.
Despite this, Borremans has made up for lost time. Represented by David Zwirner since 2001, the Belgian artist has enjoyed numerous exhibitions at the mega-gallery and elsewhere.
His travelling exhibition, As sweet as it gets, which included 100 works from the past two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. It was later shown at Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Dallas Museum of Art.
Now, Borremans will present The Promise (9 April–9 June 2024), his first solo exhibition in mainland China at Prada Rong Zhai, a 1918 residence restored by the French fashion house in downtown Shanghai.
The exhibition features 23 paintings and one film across the historic space. Among the paintings is Five Cones (2020), depicting a series of five satin cones in varying colours, belongs to a series of works where coloured satin cones are the protagonists.
Initially intended as a prop for another series in which Borremans asked the models to pose with a costume they'd made, the satin cones began to take on a life of their own. Numerous exhibitions, both at Zwirner and the recently closed Zeno X Gallery, have been dedicated to the soulless cone figures.
As for The Storm (2006), a one-minute looped video of three men in white suits, it plays out like a moving painting.
'They were three guys who were acting in another film of mine but here they are just resting,' Borremans told Ocula Magazine in 2018.
'They were just young guys and they'd been out the night before on drugs and they were just sitting there. I saw them there by accident and told the cameraman "Please film this!" And it was much better than the film I was working on. I threw away the other film and kept this.'
The Lynchian film turned out to be 'really one of my favourite film works', and is presented as a large projection within the 20th-century villa.
