Brussels Gallery Weekend: 5 Must-See Exhibitions
Giulio Paolini, Due per uno (2022). Collage on framed photo prints, pencil on paper, black ink on glass, plexiglas case. 56 x 94 cm. Courtesy Baronian, Brussels.
An easy train ride from Paris or London, Belgium's small yet cosmopolitan capital of Brussels makes for an exciting city break, and Brussels Gallery Weekend is the perfect excuse. Every September, over 40 galleries join forces across the city to exhibit local and international artists.
This year's event (7–10 September 2023) offers an opportunity to encounter local up-and-coming artists through the Generation Brussels exhibition. Curated by art critic Sam Steverlynck, Cet obscur objet du désir includes work by seven artists: Chloé Arrouy, Aurélie Bayad, Maëlle Dufour, Yvan Megal, Lucian Moriyama, Nina Robert, and Bas van den Hout.
Looking at the city's offerings, below is a selection of five stand-out presentations to catch.
Katja Seib: The softest pain is the pain au chocolat
dépendance, 4 Rue du Marché aux Porcs
7 September–28 October 2023
German painter Katja Seib incorporates symbolism into her figurative paintings to create surreal compositions. Human figures are central to these scenes, which are rendered on raw hessian from photographs the artist takes on her phone, along with elements drawn from her memory.
There is often a dark undercurrent to these paintings, and they have found a large following since the artist graduated with an MFA from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2016. Sadie Coles HQ held a solo exhibition of her work in London in 2018, which was followed by her inclusion in Made in L.A. 2020.
The softest pain is the pain au chocolat marks the artist's return to dépendance following her first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2020, this time presenting ceramics alongside paintings. A characteristic ambiguity reigns across Seib's works, with titles such as Postpartum (2023) leaving their narratives open-ended to viewers.
With Seib's paintings, the line between dreams and reality is always blurred, making for an evocative viewing experience.
Laís Amaral: Estude fundo
Mendes Wood DM, 13 Rue des Sablons
7 September–21 October 2023
A self-taught artist, Laís Amaral turned to painting after graduating from the School of Social Service at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro in 2017. For Amaral, the medium provides a tool to reflect on the desertification of Brazil, where vast portions of the country are uninhabitable due to climate change.
In Amaral's work, this reality doubles as a metaphor for blanqueamiento. Translating to 'whitening', the term refers to an ideology favouring light skin that followed the abolition of slavery in Brazil, which resulted in immigration policies seeking to attract European immigrants whilst discriminating against migration from countries, such as those in Africa.
For the artist, the process of 'deep study', as translated from the exhibition's title Estude fundo, involves forming non-white codes and communication to initiate a closer relationship to nature and unleash the latent potentials of abstraction through the fluidity of paint.
In 2017, Amaral co-founded the Trovoa collective alongside Ana Cláudia Almeida, Carla Santana, and Ana Clara Tito as a space for artists who are developing their practices outside specialised or academic contexts.
Nathanaëlle Herbelin: Undivided Attention
Xavier Hufkens, 107 Rue Saint-Georges
25 August–21 October 2023
Undivided Attention, the title of Nathanaëlle Herbelin's debut exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, reflects the artist's devotion to her sitters. Through acute observation, Herbelin draws out the essence of her subjects and their surroundings.
In this latest series of paintings, friends, family members, neighbours, the artist's partner, and sometimes strangers are painted in domestic environments, adding to their intimate feel. Through thin coats of oil paint, forms are suggested rather than perfectly represented, giving the paintings a gestural, expressive feel.
Half French and half Israeli, Herbelin was born in 1989 and grew up in a small village in Israel. She began learning painting in Tel Aviv before relocating to Paris to attend the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, graduating with a master's degree in 2016.
She now splits her time between Tel Aviv and Paris and has had solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions including Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery in Israel, the French Institute of Tel-Aviv, and Jousse Entreprise gallery.
Eric Croes: La nuit est une femme à barbe
Sorry We're Closed, 39 Rue des Minimes
7 September–28 October 2023
Around 2013, Brussels-based artist Eric Croes decided to put the brush down and reset after almost two decades of painting. Taking night classes in ceramics, he developed a unique visual vocabulary drawing from his memories and surroundings.
His playful sculptures incorporate the bold colours that defined his paintings and have since been exhibited at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Almine Rech, and Richard Heller Gallery, along with a solo presentation at New York's Armory Show with Sorry We're Closed in 2019.
Employing faces and surreal and abstract shapes and details, they come together as avant-garde assemblages and often in totemic form. For his 2022 exhibition with Richard Heller Gallery, the artist gave a disposable camera to his boyfriend and family members, asking them to take photos of their daily surroundings. From these snapshots, he extracted different elements, which were then rendered as sculptures.
For his latest exhibition at Sorry We're Closed, the artist draws from a lifelong fascination with the night sky, splitting the gallery into heaven and hell, with hell on the top floor and heaven below to overturn traditional understandings of these realms.
Da Torino: Giorgio Griffa, Giulio Paolini, Gilberto Zorio
Baronian, 2 Rue Isidore Verheyden
7 September–10 November 2023
Marking the 50th anniversary of Albert Baronian's journey as a gallery owner, artworks by three historic avant-garde artists from Turin in Italy—of the same generation as Baronian—are brought together in Brussels.
All three artists are associated with the Arte Povera movement, which took hold of cities throughout Italy in the 1960s as artists sought to break down the hierarchies of art. Using simple, everyday materials, they attempted to express the democratic potentials of art, finding ways to equate it with the essence of life itself.
Among other areas of exploration, the artists in this exhibition engaged with conceptual art as well as Analytical painting, as in the case of Giorgio Griffa, whose abstract acrylic paintings on unprimed and unstretched canvas sought to explore the medium's basic function.
In the 1970s, Griffa exhibited at the historic gallery Multipli in Turin, along with Paolini and Zorio. From 1970 to 1975, the gallery aimed to demonstrate the democratic potential of art. Zorio, who used materials such as animal skins and aluminium, was fascinated with the star as a motif and means to consolidate an expression of energy and matter into simple form. Paolini, meanwhile, became renowned for his use of collage and mirrors as tools of spatial fragmentation, thus calling into question the relationship between the artwork and viewers. —[O]
