Contemporary Belgian artists continue to be critical and engaged with issues linked to the politics, the environnement and to societal questions.
The scarcity of international exhibitions by Belgian artists in no way reflects reality. Belgian’s thriving art world is growing fast—and the strength of Belgian art will only grow.
Streamlining this rigorous and expanding Belgian contemporary art world into a list of 5 artists is a challenge. This is a mere selection focused on a range of established and emerging artists, the majority of whom are based in Belgium. Working across performance, installation, photography, painting, sculpture, fashion, and ceramics, each artist has a distinctive aesthetic vocabulary, which affirms their place in the global canon of contemporary art.
Jean-François Octave, Agrandir le ciel, Lithographie, 63 x 90 cm, edited with Bruno Robbe
Jean-François Octave has produced numerous works integrating into public space. These installations generally associate known and unknown faces, aphorisms, extracts from diaries, photos, etc. and thus confront the collective imagination with the intimate sphere: the history of the world mingles with the artist's personal memories, which in turn appeal to our own emotions.
Yuri Andries, Buddha Thiksey, Ladakh, 2018, Photograph, digital print, metal frame, 70 x 53 cm
The visual language of Yuri Andries is fed by both the desire and the encounters with the unknown. His photos are inspired by local observations, interviews with the inhabitants or by articles that he has read. He adopts a method of photography that is closely connected to the methodology of documentary film. Andries’ fascination for photography stems primarily from the contradiction that photography is used both as evidence of the reality and at the same time it stimulates our imagination. The tension between the perception of the reality filtered by the subjective view of the observer remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Andries.
Benoit Jacques, Plan S Integral, litography, 63 x 90 cm, edited by Bruno Robbe
Benoît Jacques is a well-known illustrator, comic book author and Belgian artist. Guided only by his fantasy and his inspiration, he has published and produced since 1989, rare and atypical books which combine several genres and techniques in a very singular way. This creator and sculptor has chosen to self-publish and manage all stages of production and distribution to create freely.
Alice Janne, Nr 367/2013 Light.Pink.Typo, 2013, 51 x 43,5 cm
"Alice Janne, archeologist from the present." Alice Janne gets her artistic inspiration from scaling into a bigger size the original dimensions and colors of small objects and pieces of paper she finds in the streets. Each work is manually enlarged by a scaling calculation on paper by the artist. The colors on each object are created by the artist and painted directly on the object. Each work is therefore the result of a lengthy and labor intensive artistic process. By reproducing manually each piece of paper on a larger scale with identical but more striking colors, the artist succeeds in uncovering the – otherwise invisible – beauty and magic of otherwise considered as hideous, banal and useless pieces of discarded waste.
Simon Van Parys, Water Soul, Paint, photo, varnish on aluminum plate, 100 x 50 cm
Artist Simon Van Parys invites you to experience a new world throughout his work. Explosive engines and locomotives with insectoid properties develop and grow here. In his 2D work, the artist shows us his filtered view of his sculptures. His designs are a reinterpretation of the photos of those sculptures, albeit cut up. The distance means that dynamics and composition remain, comparable to a piece of music made on the basis of his 3D work: the concept fades, the flow, dynamics, power and extravaganza remain. The photo montages are cut out, mounted on an aluminum support and painted in a layered play of radical cut-outs. As a viewer we get an injection of a disrupted present projected in an imaginary future.