GHOST IN A SHELL

18 APRIL — 30 APRIL, 2018

Featuring: Michaël Borremans, Pieter Brueghel, Francis Alÿs, Harold Ancart, René Magritte, Luc Tuymans

The show brings together a group of Belgian painters who span across centuries, and create moments of contemplation through their poetic observations of everyday life. Set within the historic hôtel de maître space, the works are contextualized by the domestic environment and evoke the Flemish tradition of painting and secular patronage. A figurative narrative becomes the leitmotif for the show, with the each artist’s approach to their subject yielding a partial and incomplete gesture. Each painting embodies a memory held in time and a voyeuristic look through another’s eyes.

A local scene of springtime flurry by Pieter Brueghel sets a historic touchpoint for the show, and offers a narrative recollection of daily life lived centuries ago. The 16th century Flemish master broke away from past tradition and focused on the celebration of the quotidian and domestic experiences.

Francis Alÿ​s, Michaël Borremans, and Luc Tuymans represent a generation of contemporary Belgian artists who seek to find meaning in figurative painting as an intimate and internal experience.​ Alÿs gravitates towards motifs that are at once abstract and replete with referential meaning. His diptych presents a Royal Logistic Corps soldier, stationed in repose, beside a colour patch taken from the soldier’s sleeve. Charged with poetic and political trauma, it magnifies a small moment.

I don’t want to make portraits on a psychological level. I take all the ideas out of individuality and just leave the shell, the body. To make a portrait of someone on a psychological level, for me, is an impossibility; I am much more interested in the idea of masks, of creating a blindfolded space of mirrors. — Luc Tuymans

The haunting portraits by M​ichaël Borremans and Luc Tuymans are emblematic of each artist’s gesticulation and desire for probing psychological layers. Borremans’ hooded figure, softly titled L​ily, harkens to a childlike nightmare while Tuymans’s ​In the End You're Just Dad​ sets up a wordplay that memorializes one’s father.

The youngest of the group, Harold Ancart, has been an important voice in new generation of young Belgian artists. Ancart’s early works reveal his mastery as a draftsman as he attempts to capture the instability of images and failing echos of recollection. ​The works are meant to be viewed as fragments of thoughts and incomplete verses, embodied within the shell of the architectural space they inhabit.