Art Antwerp

Diana Scherer explores the relationship between nature, design and material through an innovative apporach to textile-making. In her work, she cultivates living root systems into intricate organic fabrics, combining natural plant fibres with textiles of her own design. By working with soil, seeds, water, light and specially developed ubdergound patterns, she guides the groth of plant roots into delicate, richly textured surfaces. Her practice unfolds in the space between intention and unpredictability, bringing together biological pprocesses and artistic intervention to create works that challenge the boundaries between the natural and the man-made.

In Keetje Mans’s paintings, reality takes an unexpected turn. Domestic scenes, lush vegetation and familiar objects form the backdrop for scenes in which something elusive seems to be happening. Her images hover between dream and memory, the recognisable and the fantastical. What at first glance appears light and playful reveals, on closer inspection, a subtle tension in which beauty, wonder and alienation converge. With her intuitive style of painting, Mans creates a world that cannot be fully explained, but invites the viewer to look at it again and again.

As Things Are brings Alexandra Phillips and Koen Kievits together through a shared attentiveness to the things that surround us. Both artists work with existing materials and objects, removing them from their assumed function and context. Through collecting, shifting, altering, combining and balancing, new relationships emerge between material, space and meaning. Rather than seeking the spectacular, their work focuses on what reveals itself through sustained attention. As Things Are is an exhibition about looking closely: at the particular qualities of materials, at chance and order, and at the unexpected meanings embedded in the everyday.

How do we read the world, and what happens when it refuses to be read?

This booth brings together two artists who each, in their own language, unsettle the systems we use to make sense of things. Antwerp-based painter Anouk Van Offenwert (b. 1997) works on large unprimed canvases with ink and handmade paint. Her lines hover between drawing and writing: a stroke almost becomes a letter, then slips away again. Meaning is suggested but never fixed, and the boundary between what is living and what is merely animated becomes porous. Sculptor Bram De Jonghe (b. 1985, Ostend) builds objects and spatial interventions that border on the absurd. Moulds and their negatives, found materials and inventive do-it-yourself constructions produce works that seem to have a function but resist any rational explanation. They ask to be felt rather than understood. Placed side by side, the two practices form a dialogue between surface and space, sign and object. Van Offenwert’s paintings invite slow, almost linguistic looking; De Jonghe’s sculptures interrupt that reading with humour and physical presence. De Jonghe responds directly to the architecture of the booth itself, treating the fair’s white walls not as a neutral backdrop but as material to work with. The result is less a display than an environment, where visitors are encouraged to drop their usual interpretive tools and trust their senses. Both artists share a deep attention to material and process, and a belief that art does not need to explain itself to be meaningful. Together they propose a booth that is light-footed and open, yet rigorous in its making.

dudokdegroot has an interest in artists who explore the boundaries of their medium and presents a duo show with recent works by Annesas Appel and Vincent Uilenbroek.

The world around us is full of systems – structures that we take for granted in our daily lives. Think of our alphabet, the world of numbers, the calendar, the road network and music theory. We take the systems for granted and accept them as they are. In her work, Appel tries to map the beauty of existing systems and looks for logic and mutual connections within these systems. She finds patterns, rhythms and structures that she analyses, dissects, overlaps and re-orders, often through self-imposed rules. The work that results from this are abstract images; colors and patterns printed on paper. By weaving a grid of horizontal and vertical lines over the image with thread, the image gains an extra dimension. Because the threads also have their warp and weft according to certain rules, they give the image extra information. At the same time, it reflects the connection between the different systems. In her work, Appel shows that systems, no matter how rigid they sometimes seem, offer space for visual poetry.

Vincent Uilenbroek (NL 1980) is a screen printer pur sang. Technically skilled, he translates screen printing into unique work and experiments on paper and wood. In his work he uses the print process and its residue as a starting point. Though Uilenbroek’s visual language is abstract it has organic qualities and his painterly combination of colors gives it an almost hypnotic appeal. For his new Unfold series he carried screen-prints with a folded grid in his pocket for some time. The ingrained fold lines define a visibly passed time and form the blueprint of this series in which he unfolds, reprints and inverses.

Ivan Moraes developed a distinctive visual language rooted in the everyday spirituality of Afro-Brazilian life in Bahia, particularly through intimate portraits of women and scenes of religiosity unfolding beyond formal places of worship. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, Moraes first pursued higher education in Social Service before dedicating himself entirely to painting, a practice he had nurtured since childhood. Moraes’ treatment of lace is one of the most distinctive aspects of his practice, revealing both his technical mastery and his sensitivity to the cultural symbolism of the traditional Baiana dress. Working in tempera, he built luminous layers of white upon white, allowing tonal shifts to articulate the intricate embroidery, pleats and textures of the traditional garments. Rather than depicting lace as a static decorative detail, Moraes animated it as the fabric ripples, gathers and unfurls across the surface of the canvas. This attention elevates the lace from costume to cultural icon: an embodiment of history, ritual and syncretism. Reinforcing the strength and grace of his subjects, Moraes transforms lace into a language of reverence, celebrating the resilience of Afro-Brazilian womanhood. 

Bouts was born in Versailles in 1909 and grew up in Brittany, where his bond with the sea began. He trained in the merchant navy. In 1941 he fled the Second World War and emigrated to Argentina. In Buenos Aires he painted and taught. He looked to rock art and to the ancient art of Egypt and Greece. He also turned to medieval art and to Afro-Brazilian culture.  In 1955 he sailed the Brazilian coast aboard the sailboat Andariego. In 1961 he bought the schooner Cisne and began to live and paint on board. He settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1967 and set up his home and studio in Cosme Velho in 1971. He published a book on his work in 1981 and his memoirs in 1985. He died in Rio in 1986.

Galerie Binome is delighted to welcome a duo show bringing together the French artists Corinne Mercadier and Lisa Sartorio. This focused proposal offers an immersion into their world, at the crossroads of photography, drawing and sculpture. Their references to art history, especially to painting, strike a particular resonance with the Flemish public. Long kept secret, the role of drawing in the work of Corinne Mercadier (1955), who recently celebrated 40 years in the career, is revealed in her first exhibition at the gallery in 2022. Her drawings in colored pencil, ink and gouache, as well as her photographs incorporating paintings on glass, transport us to realms where reality and the fantastical converge. Nourished by her research and sketchbooks, her work—which leaves room for the unexpected—is rooted in the history of Western art, from Giotto’s frescoes to Renaissance landscapes. Lisa Sartorio’s recent work explores the denaturation of art through derivative products in the age of cultural and tourist consumerism. Today, masterpieces are reproduced as objects of all kinds, from jewellery to smartphone cases. Les désœuvrées, through a series of still lives, portraits and landscapes, are a mise en abîme of these reproductions, revealing both a critique of the phenomenon and a rehabilitation of the sensitive experience of the artwork

Lucas Leffler (1993, Virton, Belgium) is an experimental photographer based in Brussels. The artist searches for innovative and long-forgotten photographic techniques, fascinated by the materiality of photography. Leffler’s work is based on a strong interest in science and the myths and facts of photography history and is stimulated by a fascination with chemistry. He sees the nature of photography close to alchemy and tends to expand it to other forms like sculpture or installation. 

Within his multidisciplinary art practice, Bart Lunenburg (b. 1995, NL) researches themes related to architecture and its history, urban design, and architectural heritage. The artist approaches buildings and cities as if they had a memory of their own. Lunenburg works with photography and video as well as with sculpture, drawing, textile, and spatial installations. Usually, these different modes of expression have a similar starting point — he often creates scale models to develop his research.

At a time when our lives are being upended by the digital revolution, image overload and climate change, how can we reconnect with the living world on a sensory level? How can we rediscover our rightful place by learning to listen to its rhythms and understand its invisible forces, rather than seeking to control it? For Art Antwerp, the Galerie Émilie Dujat brings together Brankica Žilović and Antoine Grenez to explore these questions. Through their works, the two artists offer a shared reflection on the need to reconnect with the living world and to rethink our relationship with nature, with others and with ourselves.

In Tellurique, Brankica Žilović explores the invisible forces that permeate and shape living things. Inspired in particular by the mountainous landscapes of her native Serbia and the environmental changes affecting them, she develops a textile language in which threads, embroidery and tapestries become traces of subterranean currents, tensions and metamorphoses. Her monumental works and drawings give form to a world in motion, in which the ground is not merely a surface but a sensitive and active entity – a generative force capable of bringing forth human figures, memories and narratives.

In Blossom to Bloom, Antoine Grenez explores our relationship with nature through another pressing concern: that of growing up and finding one’s place in a world saturated with images, dominated by consumerism and the ubiquity of social media. Born out of a workshop held with teenagers at the Concertgebouw in Bruges, the series opens up a space for dialogue between generations. How do young people perceive the world around them? What place do they accord to living things in a daily life that is so heavily influenced by the media? Rather than pitting the real against the virtual, the artist explores the possibility of using technology as a means of reconnecting with our environment, of seeing it in a new light and of marvelling at it once more. By bringing these two approaches together, the exhibition space becomes a shared landscape, where the lines, forms and rhythms of the works echo the deep structures of living things.

Brankica Žilović tapestries and drawings engage in a dialogue with Antoine Grenez’s photographs, revealing, beneath the surface of materials and images, connections that transcend us and bind us together. This space invites us to slow down our gaze, to reconnect with what underpins our place in the living world, and to explore other ways of perceiving, feeling and inhabiting the world.

 For Art Antwerp 2026, Galerie Fontana brings together the work of Dutch artists Thijs Segers (NL 1996) and Mirte van Laarhoven (NL 1986). Although their practices differ in medium and approach, both artists share a close attention to their surroundings and to the ways in which nature, time and human presence shape our experience of the world. Both artists will create a number of new works especially for this presentation at Art Antwerp.

Thijs Segers’ paintings are often inspired by something familiar: a garden, a dog, a chair, a piece of vegetation or a view from close by. Through painting, these everyday observations take on a quieter and more elusive character. His landscapes seem to exist outside of a specific moment, suspended between presence and disappearance. There is a sense of longing in his work, but also an acceptance of change and the passing of time. His sensitivity recalls aspects of Romantic landscape painting, while remaining firmly rooted in the intimacy of his immediate surroundings.

Galerie Fontana will also present a selection of ceramic works by Mirte van Laarhoven. Her practice is rooted in a close observation of landscapes and ecosystems, and in an interest in the human impulse to shape and control the natural environment. Working with clay and other sustainable materials, she creates organic forms that balance between the recognisable and the unfamiliar. The process of making is an important part of Van Laarhoven’s work. She allows the qualities of the clay, its weight, texture and response to firing, to influence the final form. Rather than working towards a completely predetermined result, she leaves room for what happens along the way. This gives the sculptures a sense of openness and a subtle tension between control and chance.

Bringing the two practices together creates a dialogue between painting and sculpture, observation and making. Segers translates small moments from his surroundings into images, while Van Laarhoven works directly with a material that changes through touch, time and fire. Their approaches are different, yet both encourage a more attentive way of looking. The presentation reflects Galerie Fontana’s interest in artists who combine craftsmanship with a sensitivity to the world around them, but neither artist treats nature simply as a subject to be represented. At Art Antwerp, the paintings of Segers and the ceramics of Van Laarhoven come together in a quiet and open conversation. Their works invite the viewer to look closely and to consider the subtle connections between the intimate, the material and the living world.

Benjamin Ottoz’s plastic researches come from Serendipidy. When a day spray paint accidentally touchdown on a piece of crumpled paper, he discovers a new potentiality for this medium. Once crumpled, folded, pressed, tested, paper offers unsuspected, intriguing and captivating forms and volumes. With a well-established protocol including extreme handling of the paper, its painting and flattening, Benjamin Ottoz develops a contemplative poetry of this medium.

At first glance, Micky Clément’s dry pastels can be approached as a picture book imbued with the innocent poetry of childhood, into whose world he invites us. It is only once inside the citadel that we realise it is under siege. Faced with the wars of the contemporary world, the artist surrenders. Sheltered within a palace of vegetal light, he has lined his walls with wallpaper in soft hues, and spends his days in pursuit of an uneasy happiness.

MABE Gallery brings together Sofia Cacciapaglia and Nicolas Muller around two distinct approaches to presence: the body and the trace. Both artists have developed singular practices shaped by strong institutional trajectories.

Sofia Cacciapaglia (b. 1983, Italy), whose career includes participation in the Venice Biennale, places the representation of women at the heart of her painting. In her large-scale works, monumental yet ethereal female figures inhabit suspended, almost metaphysical worlds. Bodies connect through gestures, touch and silent exchanges, while flowers and botanical elements extend these presences, evoking vitality, tenderness and renewal. Her practice alternates between canvas and cardboard, two supports that give her paintings distinctly different material qualities. The traditional surface of canvas is set against the raw, fragile and irregular nature of cardboard, a discarded material to which the artist gives a second life. This tension between the refinement of the painterly gesture and the humble nature of the support runs throughout her work, reflecting a broader interest in transformation and renewal.

Nicolas Muller (b. 1983, Strasbourg) lives and works in Geneva. Working primarily with drawing and installation, his practice explores processes of line repetition, erasure and transformation. His marks, both fragile and persistent, register time, memory and the presence of the body. His work is also informed by his childhood spent near a prison environment due to his father’s profession. This experience shaped his attention to systems of authority and normative architectures, whose structures he subtly shifts, alters and reconfigures. Through simple and repeated gestures, drawing, erasing, fading and imprinting, Muller transforms perception and creates spaces between visibility and silence, presence and absence.

Conceived as an exhibition, the booth creates a dialogue between the two artists rather than separating their works into distinct presentations. Cacciapaglia’s bodies, gardens, colour and materiality are placed in conversation with Muller’s lines, repetition and processes of erasure. Density meets emptiness, matter meets trace, and appearance meets disappearance. Through these two artistic languages, MABE Gallery proposes a deliberately focused presentation in which painting and drawing inhabit a shared space, inviting the viewer to slow down and revealing a dialogue between presence and absence, materiality and fragility, construction and erasure.

Lieven Leurs’s earliest memory goes back to when he was four years old: Lieven wanted to draw a house but did not yet have the skill to succeed. This sense of inability later grew into a continuous search for what lies between abstraction and figuration. Leurs always starts from the landscape but rarely with a preconceived image. His work emerges in the process itself, from the material at hand. The gesture, the act of painting, is at least as important as the outcome. That is why his works are often intensely reworked, while their final finishing may appear strikingly simple. The use of materials follows the coincidence of what is available: paint, textiles, leftover brushes, sticks, planks in which he can carve for instance. Experimentation determines the path. The painting must grow until something surfaces—sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes self-evidently—and then he stops, precisely at the right moment.

Louiz Castiella lives and works in Brussels. In 2024, she obtained her Master’s degree in Painting from La Cambre. Her paintings and drawings evolve slowly, often requiring countless trials before arriving at the exact colours she envisions. For Castiella, precision matters: each tone must feel right, each image must resonate with her way of perceiving the world. Childhood memories play an important role in her works. Louiz’ pieces speak quietly yet with great intensity.