Final week, Brussels Artwork Week’s inaugural full-city version, RendezVous, animated the Belgian capital with exhibitions, performances, screenings and talks throughout greater than 65 venues. Based by curators Laure Decock and Evelyn Simons, the initiative reworked the town right into a walkable constellation of artwork areas spanning downtown, uptown and midtown neighborhoods. The week pulsed with ambition and wit, balancing worldwide names with native voices and institutional heft with grassroots initiatives. And whereas lots of the artwork week exhibitions stay open via October, the concentrated power of the opening days set the tone for the town’s autumn artwork season, shaking off the summer season lull.
Decock and Simons’ manifesto captures the ethos behind the mission: “For us and for a lot of, Brussels is a singular place. Conveniently central, discreetly humble—surrounded by large sisters comparable to London and Paris, however brimming with a artistic power that’s ferocious… A metropolis outlined by an enriching range, an enthralling chaos, an avant-garde that has been going regular for over 100 years and the place new developments inscribe themselves onto a canvas of sturdy artwork historic traditions.”
On the coronary heart of the 2025 programming was The Tip Inn, a brief salon conceived by Zoe Williams as art work and gathering level. Equal elements dive bar, nightclub and set up, the venue had candlelit tables, satin curtains and an environment pitched between decadence and parody. A monumental print of Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Prodigal Son (1536) presided over the room, whereas sausages hung like garlands and a video loop confirmed a lady casually relieving herself amongst glasses of champagne. Guests ordered the artist’s signature whiskey-Montenegro cocktail, pocketed lighters inscribed with “Can I present you my portfolio?” and drifted between conversations, poetry readings, screenings and DJ units.
Williams, a Marseille-based British artist, has lengthy explored the performative dimension of hospitality. By staging a bar, she foregrounded the dynamics of service, consumption and insurrection, whereas The Tip Inn itself captured Brussels humor and irreverence, reminding everybody that artwork weeks needn’t be confined to white cubes.
RendezVous unfolded throughout three most important zones. Downtown, centered across the metropolis middle and Molenbeek, there was a powerful mixture of historic reflection and up to date experimentation. At Harlan Levey Initiatives, Amélie Bouvier’s exhibition “Stars, don’t fail me now!” (on via December 13) examined humanity’s enduring fascination with the cosmos. Working with archival photo voltaic photographs from the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, the Brussels-based artist reworked deteriorating glass plate negatives into meticulously drawn “photodessinographies.” Graphite and ink captured each celestial kinds and the delicate materials traces of scratches and fingerprints. Hanging textiles comparable to Astronomical Backyard #1 and #2 prolonged this investigation into fictionalized landscapes, oscillating between scientific statement and poetic creativeness.
Close by, Galerie Christophe Gaillard opened “Le Contenu Pictural,” Hélène Delprat’s first solo present in Belgium (on via October 31). Borrowing its title from René Magritte’s irreverent ‘période vache,’ the exhibition highlighted Delprat’s personal dedication to risk-taking and play. Alongside new works, hardly ever seen gouaches from the late Nineteen Nineties testified to a two-decade hiatus in her observe, their depth sharpened by that rupture. The presentation follows her main retrospective at Fondation Maeght and precedes a forthcoming exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2027.
Grège Gallery provided a special mannequin altogether. Based in 2021 by Marie de Brouwer, the initiative bridges artwork, design and structure, and twice yearly it hosts site-specific exhibitions in extraordinary places—from medieval farmhouses to brutalist landmarks—whereas its Brussels house features as a showroom and assembly level. For RendezVous, the gallery highlighted this nomadic, cross-disciplinary ethos, underscoring how entrepreneurial visions are reshaping Brussels’ cultural panorama.
Galerie Greta Meert revisited the late profession of Sol LeWitt with “Bands, Curves and Brushstrokes” (via October 25). The works on paper from the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s charted his shift from rigorous geometry to extra fluid gestures, balancing spontaneity with systematic logic. Upstairs, the gallery previewed an internet viewing room dedicated to British artist James White. His forthcoming sequence “Indoor Nature” options photorealist work on aluminum, introduced in plexiglass packing containers, capturing home interiors the place crops introduce refined pressure between artifice and vitality.
Ixelles, the guts of uptown Brussels, was buzzing. At Almine Rech, Kenny Scharf’s “Jungle jungle jungle” (on via October 25) introduced the artist’s unmistakable universe of cartoonish ecologies and consumerist critique. Scharf, a veteran of the New York Downtown Scene that noticed Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat rise to fame, continues to broaden his cosmic pop language. Works comparable to JUNGLENIGHTZ (2025) exemplified his lush, frenetic engagement with nature, nightlife and dystopian exuberance.
Johanna Mirabel’s “I Want,” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia via October 25, highlights the custom of ex-voto portray. Drawing on each European and Latin American precedents, the French artist of Guyanese descent wove collectively sacred motifs and secular imagery. Scenes of catastrophe and restoration conveyed gratitude, anchoring her first Brussels solo exhibition in a wealthy cross-cultural lineage.
Bernier/Eliades Gallery showcased Martina Quesada with “If This Is a Area” (via October 25). Her geometric wall sculptures and pigment-on-paper works established rhythmic methods of variation and resonance. Items like The verge was all the time there (2025) interacted with shifting daylight within the gallery, blurring distinctions between materials presence and atmospheric suggestion.
At Xavier Hufkens, Charline Von Heyl’s debut exhibition in Brussels affirmed her popularity as one of the crucial ingenious painters working immediately. The canvases danced between exuberance and rigor, improvisation and self-discipline. Slightly than resolving into solutions, they insisted on portray as an open-ended inquiry—a dialogue as mischievous as it’s profound.
Transferring towards midtown neighborhoods like Sablon, Forest and Saint-Gilles, Gladstone Gallery introduced “Within the Absence of Paradise,” Nicholas Bierk’s contemplative nonetheless lifes and portraits. Drawn from private pictures, the Canadian artist’s oil work addressed grief, transformation and reminiscence with understated depth.
At Mendes Wooden DM, Julien Creuzet unveiled “Nos diables rouges, nos dérives commotions,” his first Brussels solo present, on via October 25. Anchored by the determine of the Pink Satan from Martinican carnival, the immersive set up mixed movies, wallpapers, sculptures and sound. Creuzet reimagined the masked physique as a fluid, untamed entity traversing mythologies and diasporic histories. Rice, tridents and fragmented limbs recurred as potent symbols, layering ancestral spirituality with up to date politics. His cosmology was unsettling but emancipatory, opening surprising pathways of creativeness.
Design additionally had a powerful presence. Spazio Nobile staged a joint exhibition by Kiki van Eijk and Joost van Bleiswijk, curated by Maria Cristina Didero. Celebrating twenty years of collaboration, “Pondering Arms” highlighted the duo’s whimsical but exact strategy, rooted in Eindhoven’s design tradition. Furnishings, lighting and installations demonstrated how their observe resists mass manufacturing in favor of instinct and shared invention.
Institutional programming added depth. At WIELS, the group exhibition “Magical Realism: Imagining Pure Dis/order” explored ecological precarity via fantasy and dream. Curated by Sofia Dati, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert, it assembled greater than thirty artists. Highlights included Gaëlle Choisne’s Ego, he goes, a speaking fridge full of decaying items that critiqued shopper waste whereas invoking Creole cosmologies. Works by Marisa Merz, Cecilia Vicuña and Jumana Manna bolstered the exhibition’s name for alternative routes of inhabiting the planet.
Outdoors, Sharon Van Overmeiren’s The Farewell Lodge reworked the WIELS backyard into an inflatable fortress open to kids and adults alike. Referencing pre-Columbian motifs, museological shows and Pokémon, the set up invited guests to bounce, discover and rethink what artwork will be. Its playful verticality epitomized the week’s spirit of porous boundaries between seriousness and delight.
RendezVous demonstrated how Brussels’ artwork scene thrives on contrasts—between the polished and the uncooked, the historic and the experimental, the institutional and the unbiased. It unfolded not simply as a showcase of exhibitions however as a lived expertise of the town itself, weaving fluidly via neighborhoods and communities. Removed from one other entry within the crowded calendar of artwork weeks, RendezVous affirmed Brussels’ singular place within the cultural panorama: cosmopolitan but intimate, grounded in custom but insistently forward-looking. With this momentum, anticipation for subsequent yr’s version is already mounting.
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