Explore current and upcoming exhibitions across Brussels' best galleries, institutions, and non-profit art spaces.
Read MoreAlongside a vast number of commercial galleries spread across the city, Brussels is also home to world-class museums and contemporary art centres.
Characteristic of the city's innovative flare is WIELS, which opened in 2007 in a former brewery designed by avant-garde architect Adrien Blomme in the 1930s. A stone's throw away from Gare du Midi, where trains pass from London to wider Europe, the institution features Belgian and international artists including Francis Alÿs, Phan Thao Nguyen, and Shezad Dawood.
Other contemporary art centres in the city include KANAL—Centre Pompidou, situated in a former Citroën garage. With its official opening scheduled for 2025, the multidisciplinary institution is delivering an eclectic range of cultural programmes in anticipation.
For an art history lesson in Flemish Masters, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium is home to over 20,000 artworks dating to the 15th-century. Nearby, Bozar is a vast cultural centre with theatre, music, art exhibitions, and a rooftop terrace designed by Brussels-based collective Every Island opening in 2023 that will feature outdoor cinema and musical events.
North of the city, Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte has his own dedicated museum, featuring 230 works and archives. Initially housed at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Magritte Foundation opened the collection's own space in 2009.
Lovers of Art Deco can find an extraordinary example of the architecture style south of the city at the Villa Empain, a hub for arts and culture that was acquired by the Boghossian Foundation in 2006. Since 2010, it has featured exhibitions by artists including Chun Kwang Young, Jolien De Roo, a dual exhibition of Sarkis Zabunyan and Sergueï Paradjanov in commemoration of the Aermian Genocide in 2015, and a group exhibition of Korean Dansaekhwa artists in 2016.
