Rindon Johnson | Cultuurcentrum Strombeek | 28 February – 25 Could
Seven mahogany grandfather clocks line the partitions of ‘Why inform a lifeless man the longer term’, Rindon Johnson’s solo exhibition at Cultuurcentrum Strombeek. These readymade, minimalist works had been impressed by Jennifer L. Anderson’s 2015 e book Mahogany: The Prices of Luxurious in Early America, which charts the obsession for this darkish, unique wooden amongst rich Europeans and People in the course of the mid-18th century, and the ensuing colonial and ecological violence wrought upon areas of Central America and the West Indies by the mahogany commerce. Johnson sourced his clocks from varied vintage shops throughout Europe. Within the gallery, they stand poised like haunted witnesses to time, their ticking interior workings left uncovered, and garish hand-painted particulars – bucolic European landscapes or service provider ships at sea – now chipped and fading.
Matt Connors | Xavier Hufkens | 20 March – 17 Could
Matt Connors’s cheerfully disorienting summary work and drawings might simply backdrop an acid journey in a Chuck Jones cartoon. Grids recurrently seem in Connors’s photos, generally performing as organizing containers for the artist’s preparations of polychromatic zigzags and nodules, which finally resemble stained-glass mosaics or home windows opening onto landscapes of blistering color. Elsewhere, grids turn out to be warped and distended topics in themselves. The present’s title, ‘Mysterious Leap’, originates from Sigmund Freud’s description of the incomprehensible chasm separating thoughts and physique. It’s an apt analogy for Connors’s undulating planes of kaleidoscopic pleasure, mapping a contented zone between logic and hallucination.
Allison Katz | dépendence | 23 April – 31 Could
René Magritte, whose birthplace is lower than an hour from dépendence, looms over ‘CODEPENDENCE’, a solo present by Canadian painter Allison Katz. Along with her refined, meandering textures and indirect symbolism, Katz carries Magritte’s painting-as-dream-as-semiotic-puzzle to eerie new heights. In The Nice Beneath (2025), the vacant entryway to an unfinished attic throbs with ominous significance, whereas the portray’s composition of undecorated brown and off-white rectangles threatens to dismantle actuality into nonfigurative abstraction. In Co-Creation (2025), an odalisque-like nude has been coated by two rectangular voids rendered in black paint and sand, resembling the eyeholes of a stereoscope. Katz invitations us to look by way of a pink physique in repose to a jet-black desert past.
Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel | Z33 | 30 March – 24 August
Almost all the things about Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s immersive exhibition ‘The Moist Wing’ – from its foolish title to a pink marble carving of a scuba fin match to brighten an outsized fishtank – ripples with naive surprise. A sequence of algae-green ceramic vessels sits beneath the gallery’s arches. Their delicate, hand-worked element lends them the mud-caked, snail-encrusted look of sunken treasure. On the partitions cling a number of beautiful work on silk depicting freshwater mirror carp and one monumental catfish. The splotchy gloss of ink on silk offers these works a wobbly sheen, as if we’re glimpsing the fish by way of clear shallow water. They’re an ode to the gasping, bug-eyed great thing about the lowly bottom-feeder: you’ll be able to virtually style the pond scum.
Compound Lenses | Beige | 24 April – 31 Could
Taking its title from the advanced preparations of a number of lenses discovered inside telescopes, microscopes and different optical tools, ‘Compound Lenses’ gathers work by 4 Berlin-based artists: Sofia Duchovny, Nancy Lupo, Marina Pinsky and Gianna Surangkanjananajai. Tending in direction of minimalism and conceptualism, the works quietly pry aside our personal programs of seeing. In Duchovny’s beautiful, dizzying sculpture Not Titled But (2024), for instance, a sequence of wood-mounted glass vitrines of diminishing measurement are positioned one inside the opposite like Matryoshka dolls. The floating traces of wooden and glass reassemble themselves into new symmetrical patterns as you progress across the work, viewing it from totally different angles.
Jakob Brugge | Gauli Zitter | 19 April – 31 Could
If commodification hinges on our capacity to infuse odd objects with a mystical sense of uniqueness, Jakob Brugge appears invested in reverse-engineering the method. In Brugge’s deadpan sculptures, recognizable clothes objects – reminiscent of monitor jackets, polo shirts, sailor fits and boy-scout uniforms – seem drained of their signifiers, purged of figuring out patches or logos, and custom-framed in sterile show circumstances like expensive memorabilia. For his solo present at Gauli Zitter, Brugge produced vibrant rubber moulds and casts of assorted middlebrow style equipment: a baseball cap, a deck shoe, a braided leather-based belt. He locations these objects slumped collectively in plexiglass bins (Actual Life, 2025) or mounts them on to the wall (Watch and Be taught, 2025). Simply beneath Brugge’s disconcerting humour lurk existential questions in regards to the inert supplies which assemble a so-called particular person.
Hugo Roelandt | M HKA (Museum of Up to date Artwork, Antwerp) | 14 February – 1 June
A brief journey from Brussels, a monumental retrospective at M HKA in Antwerp surveys the work of Hugo Roelandt, intrepid and extremely prolific performer, sculptor, photographer and set up artist. Although a towering determine of the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s Belgian avant-garde, Roelandt’s work stays underappreciated exterior his residence nation. Early pictures, like Self Portrait in Drag (1974) and Projected Emotions Towards One thing or Any person (1974), current the artist’s personal physique as an endlessly manipulatable medium, whereas his ‘post-performance’ work of the Eighties staged elaborate choreography for nonhuman performers, together with answering machines, electrical followers, remote-controlled helicopters and windshield wipers. Arriving ten years after his demise, ‘The Finish Is a New Starting’, Roelandt’s first ever museum retrospective, reveals the artist to be a stressed phoenix who reinvented his observe – and himself – at any given alternative.
Most important picture: Hugo Roelandt, Untitled, 1970, set up view. Courtesy: © Property of Hugo Roelandt and M HKA, Antwerp
