Featured artists

Dirk Braeckman

Dirk Braeckman (°1958) is one of the leading art photographers in Belgium. Initially he focused mainly on (self)portraits, but later he chose scenes iof abandoned sites, empty spaces, parts of the body and enlarged surfaces of objects with vague contours as themes for his black-and-white photographs.
"Braeckman photographs the dreary shower cubicles, the elevators, corridors, curtains, mattresses and frosted-glass windows. The gray photographs make these spaces appear to be even more stale than they already are in reality. Belgian art philosopher Frank Vande Veire put it aptly: 'The photographic haze lies across the depicted interiors like a layer of ash.' And Braeckman himself says, 'By keeping it dark and gray or by printing it out of focus, I eliminate part of the information which detracts from the essence. In this way I aim for a purified situation, into which you’re thrown as a viewer. I investigate things that seem insignificant. These are all places that somehow look as though they’ve been lived in, where the space has withstood a great deal or where people have gone through a lot, though you’ll never know what that was'." (De Pont).
Dirk Braeckman lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.
 

Thierry De Cordier

The Belgian contemporary artist Thierry De Cordier (°1954) has built up an exciting and complex introspective oeuvre in the course of a few decades. He is a ‘literary artist’ who makes use of all kinds of linguistic and expressive forms to give shape to his own visual idiom.
"Thierry De Cordier has made it his main concern to ‘contradict the world’ – not out of stubbornness or arrogance (though he has found many ‘lies’) but as an experiment, in order to see where it will take him. In old-fashioned handwriting, he has written that he is romantic and melancholy, and he has called himself a weary philosopher and inventor of effective systems for the discovery of happiness. In a certain sense, his drawings, writings and sculptures are messages to himself: admonitions, introspections, relativizations, intended to improve his understanding of himself and others. His sculptures, which are usually made of meagre, discarded materials, express the shortcomings of human existence, but also austerity, morality and human dignity." (De Pont).
He currently lives and works in Ostend, Belgium.

Raoul De Keyser

Raoul De Keyser (1930) is one of the most subtle abstract painters of his generation. His oeuvre is poetic, vulnerable and refined at the same time. After the New Vision period, he has been searching for the right way to turn identifiable subjects from everyday life into abstract colour fields and lines ever since the 1960s and 1970s. His extreme abstractions, however, are not cold geometric forms in hard colours, but poetically painted illusions as the frozen residue of a tangible reality.
He lives and works in Deinze, Belgium.

Ronny Delrue

The work of Ronny Delrue (°1957) has been described as crystallisations of emotional and intellectual experiences. He works in the twilight zone between figurative and abstract art, and is particularly fascinated by cognitive oppositions such as presence and absence, beautiful and ugly, knowing and forgetting, past and future. He lives and works in Ghent.

Jimmy Kets

Belgian photographer who manages to transcend the apparent banality of everyday life with the addition of a poetic, humorous, but above all alienating dimension. After all, a photograph by Jimmy Kets (°1979) tells much more than what the image shows. Averse to any staging, he records a reality that - usually only after a second viewing – rouses the viewer from slumber or encourages him or her to reflect. Behind each image is a hidden world that only comes into view by pondering its latent absurdity. This is also where the art and essence of true photography lie: recording a broader Zeitgeist or a larger picture of an era on the basis of the record of a single, well-chosen moment.

Panamarenko

Panamarenko (°1940) is an exceptional contemporary artist, who has been described as 'one of the great creators of the end of the 20th century'. Artist, engineer, poet, physicist, inventor and visionary, and has for thirthy years pursued a singular course of exploration of space, movement, flight, energy and the force of gravity.
His work, fusing artistic and technological experiment, takes on many forms: aeroplanes, flying carpets, cars, flying saucers, submarines and birds. Spectacular structures of strange beauty, both playful and inspiring.

Roger Raveel

Roger Raveel (°1921) is considered of one of Belgium's most important post-war artists. His work is both timeless and contemporary. It shuns any partisan approach. The breeding ground for Raveel's art is his immediate environment, which acquires a universal resonance through his paintings, drawings, objects and installations. "The paintings of Roger Raveel are controlled and purposeful. Their construction is clear, the individual shapes and colours find their place in compositions which are robust, but at the same time full of visual suppleness. He uses a figurative repertoire, but the structure of the paintings is abstract to at least the same extent. The oeuvre is very flexible. A great deal happens in it." (Rudi Fuchs, 1986).
Roger Raveel lives and works in Machelen-aan-de-Leie, Belgium, close to his own museum.

Johan Tahon

Johan Tahon was born in Menen (Belgium) in 1965. He lives and works in Zwalm and Oudenaarde (Belgium) and in Iznik (Turkey). He studied sculpture at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1994 Johan Tahon exposes his work on a regular basis in Belgium as well as abroad.
After several studio shows, he had his first breakthrough when he participated in the exhibition ‘De Rode Poort’ in the Ghent Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. Another milestone was his contribution in 1998 to the group exhibitions ‘Voor het verdwijnt en daarna – S.M.A.K. in de Poëziezomer van Watou' with curator Jan Hoet and the annual 'EV+A' event in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Limerick (IRL). Meanwhile his works were exhibited at prominent museums as the S.M.A.K.(Ghent), MuHKA (Antwerp), the PMMK (Ostend), IKOB (Eupen), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the GEM (Den Haag), major exhibitions as Beaufort (Ostend) and the Lustwarande (Tilburg), at Galeries as Galeri Artist in Istanbul and Berlin, Maurits van de Laar (Den Haag) and places as the Ministry of Finance (Den Haag), the Academia Belgica (Rome), the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington DC).

Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans is considered one of today’s most influential painters, assuring painting’s enduring legacy by invigorating the medium for a modern context. Born in 1958 in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is steeped in the great tradition of Northern European history painting, as well as a modern culture informed by photography, television, and cinema. This is evident in his canvases, where traditional painting collides with contemporary visual strategies, resulting in compositions that adopt technological methods, such as cropping, sequencing, or the close-up, to introduce new perspectives on painting and culture. His seemingly innocuous pictures are often grounded in previously existing imagery drawn from photographs, found images, film stills, and other contemporary visual artifacts.

Tuymans’s work is held in the collections of several international museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The artist’s first United States retrospective opened to much critical acclaim in 2009 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, travelled on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Dallas Museum of Art and and is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The retrospective will conclude in February 2011 at Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium.

Tuymans has been the subject of many solo exhibitions at international institutions, most recently at Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. Other solo exhibitions also include Műcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (traveled to Haus der Kunst, Munich and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw); Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; Museu Serralves, Porto; Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Tate Modern, London; and the 2001 Venice Biennale, where Tuymans’s work was presented in the Belgian Pavilion.
 

Hellen van Meene

Hellen van Meene (1972) is regarded as one of the leading Dutch photographers of her generation. The New York magazine Village Voice ranked her book Portretten / Portraits (2005) in the top 25 photo books of the year, and in 2007 she was chosen as the fourth most successful artist in the Netherlands.
In carefully staged poses, usually photographed in color with natural light, her models are shown in their familiar surroundings, yet also in the uncertain terrain of puberty, their physical and mental state floating somewhere between melancholy and a readiness to break out, self-abandonment and re-invention.
In 2009, her latest photo book Tout va disparaître was published by Schirmer/Mosel and Ludion.