Based in a former roller-skating rink in Brussels’ Saint-Gilles district—the first of its kind built in 1877—La Patinoire Royale – galerie Valérie Bach presents modern and contemporary art in a unique cultural setting.
Read MoreIt was first established in 2012 by Valérie Bach, but closed for an extensive renovation that was completed in 2015. The gallery’s four distinct spaces—the large nave, the glazed gallery, the first floor and the ground level—reflect its diverse cultural aims.
Harbouring both cultural and educational ambitions, La Patinoire Royale – galerie Valérie Bach’s multifaceted artistic programme centres on three areas: monumentality, strong aesthetic concerns, and female artists.
La Patinoire Royale – galerie Valérie Bach Artists
Reflecting its diverse cultural and commercial ambitions, La Patinoire Royale – galerie Valérie Bach represents modern and contemporary artists of various ages and nationalities, working across various disciplines.
Among the gallery’s roster are influential figures such as Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, a pioneer of post-war Latin American abstraction; Venezuelan-French artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, a leading figure in the 20th century optical and kinetic art; and Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, whose career, centred around the body in urban and natural landscapes, spans half a century.
Alongside them the gallery presents younger artists like Portuguese creator of playful, surreal, large scale installations, Joana Vasconcelos; Franco-British sculptor and performance artist Alice Anderson, known for her copper-wire woven works; and New York-based, Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist Trong Gia Nguyen, who challenges contemporary socio-economic power structures.
The gallery also represents several artist duos and collectives including the Luxembourg artist duo Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil, who are concerned with space and shapes, Belgian interdisciplinary contemporary art collective LAb[au]; and multidisciplinary, ecological, and social sustainability-focused duo Lucy + Jorge Orta.
La Patinoire Royale – galerie Valérie Bach Exhibitions and Art Fairs
Reflecting the broad spectrum of artists it represents and its cultural and educational aims, La Patinoire Royale galerie – Valérie Bach’s exhibition programme offers a diverse selection of in-depth curated group and solo shows. This includes solo shows featuring new or thematically linked works by gallery and guest artists, and group shows more broadly exploring the gallery’s core cultural, social, and artistic concerns.
Developing a quasi-institutional reputation, the gallery also presents historical survey exhibitions of important international and Belgian modern art movements. Among them are Painting Belgium (1945–1975) (2019) and Sculpting Belgium (2017), which extensively examined Belgian post-war art through abstract paintings and sculpture on a scale not attempted for over 40 years.
Strengthening its international position, the gallery also participates in several major art fairs including Luxembourg Art Week, Art Paris, BRAFA Art Fair, Asia Now in Paris, and A Performance Affair in Brussels.
The artists are El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias and Ai Weiwei, and they were commissioned to create a mix of sculptures, light installations and suspended artworks for the 14-acre premises, known as the Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim Campus.
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Born in Caracas in 1923, Carlos Cruz-Diez discovered a love of drawing as a child, enrolling at age 17 at the city's School of Fine Art, where his peers included Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, who alongside Cruz-Diez would become the foremost Venezuelan artists of the 20th century.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, whose vibrating polychromatic abstractions plumbed the atmospheric and phenomenological effects of color, died in Paris on Saturday at age ninety-five. Born in 1923 in Caracas, Cruz-Diez enrolled at the city's School of Plastic and Applied Arts in 1940.
