CENTRALE and Look Up

Temporary closure from 13 January to 26 January 2025
 

01.01.2024 > 31.12.2025

ART POPS

Step into Art Pops, an immersive art experience brought to visitors by the Belfius Art Collection, in which their senses become the brushstrokes of creativity. This unique exhibition invites visitors to explore art beyond sight, engaging the senses of touch, sound, and even smell in order to awaken a deeper connection with each piece. It’s a great way to dive into vibrant installations that pop with colour and vibrate with energy, and to feel the textures of artistic expression. Art Pops is more than an exhibition, it’s a sensory journey that redefines how we perceive and interact with art. 
 

18.10.2024 > 20.06.2025

Alechinsky, Pinceau Voyageur

For the first time, the Boghossian Foundation is presenting a solo exhibition devoted to a major twentieth-century European artist in the unique setting of the Villa Empain. The exhibition, curated by Catherine de Braekeleer, brings together an exceptional collection of a hundred works and numerous archival documents, gathered over the past seventy years. Alechinsky, pinceau voyageur is an ode to travel, exploring the artist's fascination with artistic practices and traditions in Japan and China. An ode to freedom, showcasing the artist's experimentation with different techniques and mediums since 1947. An ode to friendship, with works created in collaboration with artists like Jiří Kolář, Hans Spinner, or accompanying the works of authors such as Salah Stétié, Amos Kenan, and Joyce Mansour. An ode to love, since the exhibition centres around the image of the previous unseen painting titled Comme elle partait, created in 2023 as a tribute to Micky (1928-2023), whom he married in 1949.

26.09.2024 > 16.03.2025

Echoes of Art Deco

In the context of the centenary commemoration of Art Deco in 2025, the Boghossian Foundation is presenting a thematic exhibition on this key movement in Brussels. The term Art Deco refers to the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, held in Paris in 1925, which provided a unique opportunity for architects and the public to immerse themselves in this fresh, innovative spirit. Echoes of Art Deco invites visitors to explore the iconic architecture of the Villa Empain, a paragon of Art Deco with an eventful past. Set against the lively musical backdrop of the era, the exhibition offers an immersive experience in the lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties. The Art Deco movement encompassed both architecture and the decorative arts. Furniture takes centre stage in a scenography that recreates the intimate atmosphere of a private residence. Drawings, ceramics, woodwork and ironwork transport visitors to a time oriented towards modernity, technical progress, and the forthcoming society of leisure. Stained glass, an exemplary marker ofstylistic evolution, is showcased by an exceptional collection of 25 original pieces, alongside the complete preparatory drawings for Anto Carte’s La Gioconda, which was exhibited at the 1925 International Exhibition in Paris

15.11.2024 > 25.05.2025

Monira Al Qadiri - The Archaeology of Beasts

Monira Al Qadiri is an international artist whose practice explores topics as diverse as ancient history and the possibilities of new technologies, always from a critical yet playful point of view. Bozar is hosting her first solo exhibition in Belgium, titled The Archeology of Beasts. Consisting of new digitial creations commissioned for this occasion, the the exhibition represents a new visual turn Al Qadiri, inspired by the Gods and Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. Interweaving ancient myths and recent facts connected to climate change, Al Qadiri's works oscillate between humour and beauty, often charged with an underlying violence. For this exhibition, she is asking visitors to reflect on who qualifies as a Human and who as a Beast.

14.11.2024 > 09.03.2025

Hosting

hosting welcomes and celebrates the artistic diversity of the Brussels scene, opening up to the city, its periphery, its artists and its audiences. The exhibition is presented as a large-scale cabinet of curiosities, occupying all of Centrale’s spaces. It is based on an open call to Brussels-based artists of all generations and disciplines in the visual arts. The exhibition examines the notions of hospitality, territory, solidarity and emergence in the current art ecosystem. The works have been selected and curated by an artistic committee including guest artists Manon de Boer, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Juan Pablo Plazas and Richard Venlet, and Tania Nasielski, the artistic director at Centrale.

10.10.2024 > 09.02.2025

Pre-Architectures

06.11.2024 > 30.03.2025

A Public Affair

The exhibition explores the boundaries between the private and public spheres, highlighting
conflicts that may emerge when personal issues become collective. A selection of works from Frédéric de Goldschmidt’s collection by Aline Bouvy, Romuald Hazoumè, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sophie Nys, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Barthélémy Toguo, Nico Williams and many other established and upcoming artists, curated by Bayo Hassan Bello

12.09.2024 > 28.03.2025

Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 - Today

16.10.2024 > 09.03.2025

Untold Stories - Women Designers in Belgium 1880-1980

Temporary closure from 13 January to 26 January 2025
 

16.10.2024 > 13.04.2025

Kasper Bosmans

Van den Wheghe, a company specialising in noble materials run by Tanguy Van Quickenborne, has invited Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans (1990, Lommel, Belgium) to take up a residency at the company, giving the artist the opportunity to explore the craft of the artisan and to confront himself with the most inspiring materials. As part of this residency project, the CAB Foundation is presenting a year of mutual exploration and improvisation, culminating in a presentation of the artist’s marbles. Kasper Bosmans is a keen observer of how images can oscillate on the border between nature and fiction, or art and craft. With an intuitive anthropological approach, he is interested in the remnants of local traditions and the mythological iconography of contemporary life.

15.01.2025 > 15.02.2025

Contacts: Hana Miletić in conversation with Nicole and Walter Leblanc. Curated by María Inés Rodríguez

02.10.2024 > 27.04.2025

Smooth as velvet

The Horta Museum has invited five artists to dress the walls of the house. Following the successful ‘Pushing Back the Walls’ exhibition held in 2022, it is now velvet’s turn to take centre stage as it decorates the walls of this famous home. Louisa Carmona, Elise Peroi, Marc Van Hoe and Flore and Pauline Fockedey were all given full creative freedom for this project.
 

13.09.2024 > 30.05.2025

Belgian Art Nouveau. Van de Velde, Serrurier-Bovy, Hankar & Co

In the Saint-Gilles district of Brussels, a sleeping beauty is awakening. For its first exhibition since its opening, the Maison Hannon is presenting Belgian Art Nouveau in all its diversity, through a wide range of art pieces from public and private collections, many of which have never been seen before. Art nouveau. A style? More like a state of mind, and an insatiable faith in modernity. In 1900, at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, Brussels was the field of experimentation for a subversive style. Whilst Victor Horta addressed himself to a wealthy clientele, Paul Hankar, Henry van de Velde and Gustave Serrurier-Bovy worked together to invent a modern way of life that was simpler, with the aim of popularising it. Through this committed approach, they sought to be pioneers of change and to establish the foundations of a first modernity.

01.09.2024 > 02.02.2025

Drafts. From Rubens to Khnopff

How is a work of art created? This is the question that the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium are seeking to answer with an exhibition devoted to sketching. A tour of one hundred works takes visitors into the intimacy of the creative process, inviting them to push open the doors of the studio in an attempt to grasp the very soul of the work, the first idea laid down on a blank sheet of paper, a plank of wood or a piece of cardboard. This immersion offers a new, behind-the-scenes perspective on the creations of iconic artists, from Rogier van der Weyden to James Ensor, by way of Rembrandt, Rubens and Magritte. Based around the exceptional collections of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, this unique exhibition is the result of a major restoration campaign carried out by the museum's teams over a period of almost two years.
 

11.10.2024 > 16.02.2025

Emily Mae Smith X René Magritte

Emily Mae Smith (USA, 1979), a young American painter, has been invited by the Magritte Museum to create a unique dialogue with his fascinating universe. Most of Emily Mae Smith’s works feature an anthropomorphic broomstick figure, inspired by Disney's Fantasia (1940). This figure becomes the artist's avatar, simultaneously referring to the painter's brush, the working tool of housemaids, and the phallus, giving her paintings a sexual dimension. Emily Mae Smith stages this broom-brush figure in various contexts: a seventeenth-century interior, a rocky exterior, a cave, etc. She accompanies it with props and objects borrowed from Symbolism (skull, flowers, still life…) and Surrealism. She readily includes direct references to art history, and to Magritte's work: here and there, one recognises an apple, a burnt-out candle, rocks... New works made exclusively for the exhibition are displayed alongside loans from private and public collections.
 

11.10.2024 > 02.03.2025

Draw me a train

This exhibition showcases the work of some of the greatest artists whose work, in their time, captured the beauty of trains: Victor Horta, Henry van de Velde, Paul Delvaux, Franquin, Santiago Calatrava, François Schuiten and many others. Original drawings by Victor Horta relating to his work on the Brussels-Central station will be displayed to the public for the first time. Cars dating from the 1930s, designed by Henry van de Velde, have also been restored specially for the occasion and will be the subject of an exclusive presentation. Visitors will be able to learn how to draw some of the museum’s most beautiful trains and a selection of remarkable and unusual objects from SNCB's collections at drawing tables and easels interspersed throughout the exhibition circuit

19.09.2024 > 11.05.2025

Viewing Depot EXH#03 - Year of the Dragon

EXH#03 is the third major presentation highlighting recent acquisitions and seminal works from the collection, all in the unique setting of a viewing depot. Drawing inspiration from the Chinese calendar and astrology, the thematic core of this exhibition is the zodiac sign of the dragon, symbolising creativity, curiosity, confidence and generosity. Associative in nature, EXH#03 brings together large-scale works that combine aesthetic innovation and emotional intensity. One of the focal points in the exhibition, spanning the full three floors of the Vanhaerents Art Collection, is Ai Weiwei’s haunting installation Life Vest Snake (2019), which seamlessly intertwines traditional Eastern iconography with poignant reflections on the contemporary refugee crisis

01.04.2024 > 01.02.2025

Willem Oorebeek. Obstakles

WIELS presents Obstakles, a major retrospective exhibition of Willem Oorebeek, an artist of Dutch origin who has been living and working in Brussels for the past thirty years. The exhibition encompasses approximately forty sets of work ranging from the 1990s to new productions. Spread across two floors, the exhibition highlights Oorebeek’s in-depth exploration of authorship and aura through mass-produced images and the reproduction of techniques of appropriation, calling the claim of the unique experience of painting into question. Through elaborate processes of repetition and superimposition, his work simultaneously thematises mediatic forms of representation and the viewer’s possibilities of perception. In an age of visual information overload and the ubiquitous spectacle, Oorebeek’s work delves sensitively into the image’s dynamics of attracting attention, without compromising its mystery.
 

01.02.2025 > 27.04.2025

Paulo Nazareth

Paulo Nazareth is a travelling artist who creates as he walks. His work, which includes performances, videos, photographs and sculptures, is akin to a protean travel diary. Across the Americas and Africa, he follows migration routes on foot or by bus, documenting social tensions and exhuming parts of the collective memory. He roams the world like a nomad with the aim of producing traces that might result in a work of art. In this exhibition, Nazareth’s interdisciplinary, participatory work connects his life to his artistic output

01.02.2025 > 27.04.2025

l'Atelier du Faux

Rare and desirable goods have always stimulated the ingenuity of counterfeiters. Counterfeit coins have been in circulation for as long as money has existed, and the same applies to religious relics, works of art and luxury items. When it comes to printed matter, however, forgery is not always the opposite of truth. As Umberto Eco points out, it is extremely difficult to give a satisfactory definition to such terms as ‘fake’, ‘forgery’, ‘pseudo’, ‘falsification’, ‘facsimile’, ‘counterfeiting’, ‘apocryphal’, ‘similar’, ‘copy’. And the real headache for theorist is to decide what is meant by an ‘authentic object’. (Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation). This exhibition is an attempt to show the nuances and reflections of forgery in the field of books.
 

12.10.2024 > 02.02.2025

Pinned! Contemporary Antwerp Jewellery

This exhibition presents the extraordinary collection by Antwerp collector Dirk Schrijvers, consisting of 200 jewels by more than 60 designers. With this unique exhibition, the DIVA museum offers an insight into jewellery made in Antwerp during the past 25 years. It is a celebration of craftsmanship and innovation. From bold statement pieces to sophisticated subtle touches and technological developments, each piece of jewellery tells its own story

25.10.2024 > 21.04.2025

Cindy Sherman - Anti-Fashion

28.09.2024 > 02.02.2025

What's the story?

28.11.2024 > 09.02.2025

Panamarenko on paper

‘There is a wonder somewhere in that mechanism. If you could poke that out...’. This one sentence seems to sum up Panamarenko's oeuvre. His life's work seemed like a kind of game without limits where experimentation took precedence over result. Or did it? KMSKA will be gathering together Panamarenko's most playful works on paper for this exhibition
 

01.02.2025 > 04.05.2025

COMPASSION

Wanting to help others and feeling or showing compassion is typically human. This new exhibition at the MAS explores questions such as: How do people put their compassion for others into practice? Why do they do it, and what are good examples of it? In this exhibition, visitors discover how the idea of compassion is represented in art and culture: religious and non-religious objects, works of art, popular objects and decorative pieces, as well as music, stories and customs show how people always strive to help others. Contemporary testimonies and critical voices also show how topical the theme is and still remains

01.02.2025 > 31.08.2025

Pre-Columbian art. Collection Paul & Dora Janssen-Arts

01.09.2023 > 01.01.2026

Open Air Sculpture Park

01.09.2023 > 01.01.2026

Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor

28.09.2024 > 02.02.2025

Albrecht Dürer and Antwerp

07.12.2024 > 31.03.2025

Reopening of the Rubenshuis

30.08.2024 >

Candice Breitz

01.02.2025 > 11.03.2025

Surréalisme, pour ainsi dire…

05.10.2024 > 26.01.2025

Pol Pierart. De progrès ou de force

05.10.2024 > 26.01.2025

Studio Stone

The Photography Museum in Charleroi and the Amsab - Institut d’Histoire Ouvrière et Sociale in Ghent are joining forces to present the work of avant-garde photographers Cami and Sasha Stone.
Also on view:
Jean-Marc Wull. Les portraits retrouvés
Lucie Pastureau

01.02.2025 > 18.05.2025

Restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece

02.05.2025 > 01.03.2026

Erich Heckel

12.10.2024 > 26.01.2025

Eloquent Formalism. Collection Andries–Vanlouwe

MDD has officially inaugurated the renovated annexe with the exhibition Eloquent Formalism, presenting a wide selection from the Andries-Vanlouwe Foundation collection together for the first time. The collection of Jan and Lieve Andries-Vanlouwe was initiated during the Cold War period. The canon of European art history still seemed valid, and the narratives about art as a means of communication across borders and continents remained relatively undisputed. The collection reflects a deep-seated belief in a democratic and open-minded idea of art. Artists: Pierre Alechinsky, Lawrence Carroll, Lucio Fontana, Isa Genzken, Hans Hartung, Imi Knoebel, Eugène Leroy, René Magritte, Robert Mangold, Nic Nicosia, Panamarenko, Serge Poliakoff, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Léon Spilliaert, Mitja Tušek, Luc Tuymans, Koen van den Broek, Dan Van Severen, Hilde Van Sumere, Marthe Wéry

17.11.2024 > 06.04.2025

Out of this World

The joint exhibition Out of this World brings together a comprehensive selection of works by German artists Imi Knoebel (born 1940) and Blinky Palermo (1943-1977). 
Both Knoebel and Palermo, each in his own unique way, examine art from the inside—as an idiosyncratic cosmology determined and regulated by the artist—as well as from the outside—reflecting on the status of the creative outcome as an object in the world. Both artists are known for their exploration of the specific architectural givens of the physical site of display, which will make the spaces of Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens an integral part of the exhibition. 
 

17.11.2024 > 06.04.2025

MONOS. Artist Museums: Shrines and Reflections

03.11.2024 > 09.02.2025

Emptiness around me. A temporary farewell to the Roger Raveel Museum

The museum is preparing for a temporary farewell: it will close its doors in spring 2025 for renovation works that will take just over a year. The museum halls will be stripped down and a selection of works from the collection will be hung sparingly. The focus shifts to Raveel's later works in which the colour white plays a leading role.

13.10.2024 > 09.02.2025

25th anniversary of the Roger Raveel Museum

The museum looks back on its 25 years of existence through photographs, archives, an overview of exhibitions and highlights, and video interviews with the honorary curators Roland Jooris and Piet Coessens, amongst others. Special attention is also paid to the architecture, a design by Stéphane Beel, and the construction history of the Roger Raveel Museum.
 

03.11.2024 > 09.02.2025

HELL ON EARTH, in search of Pur, Nur and Fur - Joris Van de Moortel

05.10.2024 > 02.03.2025

Lucy McKenzie

29.09.2024 > 23.02.2025

Autofiction

06.10.2024 > 16.02.2025

Daniel Turner

Daniel Turner (USA, 1983) works with abandoned infrastructure, recovering and working with found elements to make the spirit of places tangible. For his first museum exhibition in Belgium, he has worked with a particularly highly charged site, namely the Prison de Forest. Taking advantage of the dismantling of the prison, he explored the space and collected materials capable of recording the initial sensations generated by this carceral environment

15.12.2024 > 06.04.2025

L’obscur objet des désirs les plus clairs. Rachel Labastie and Nicolas Delprat

16.11.2024 > 02.03.2025

Those of Marchoul

24.01.2025 > 18.05.2025

Peter Morrens – OEEEEEEUUUUVVRE

11.10.2024 > 02.03.2025

Collection of M

29.06.2024 > 29.04.2029

The worlds of Paul Delvaux

04.10.2024 > 16.03.2025

Buddha

This year, Mariemont is showcasing its Asian collections! And who better than the figure of Buddha to embody the collective imaginary of East Asia? The exhibition examines the many representations of Buddha, the Buddhist pantheon and rituals. Every sculpture, painting and sacred object on display carries a meaning, a devotion, an active significance. The exhibition is an experience in which audiences are invited to create, offer, meditate and participate. Mariemont is embarking on a new path: that of the sensitive, multi-sensory prism

21.09.2024 > 20.05.2025

Eternal Spring. Gardens and Tapestries in the Renaissance

14.12.2024 > 16.03.2025

Surrealism: turning reality upside down

19.10.2024 > 16.02.2025

Reflections of the Orient in the Middle Ages

A place of welcome, dialogue and exchange, the land of the Pharaohs has never ceased to captivate civilisations and leave its mark, far beyond the boundaries of time and geography. From ancient times, Egypt - and Alexandria in particular - became an unrivalled cultural and intellectual crossroads, where ancient, Jewish and Christian - and later Islamic - traditions blended harmoniously and enriched each other. The unsuspected cradle of Christianity and crucible of the medieval Western imagination, Egypt became a major centre for the dissemination of Christian thought from the first centuries of our era, witnessing the emergence of one of the oldest expressions of Christianity: the Coptic Church. Reflections of the Orient in the Middle Ages - Egypt at the crossroads of cultures invites you to rediscover this land of syncretism, a veritable link between East and West.
 

15.11.2024 > 16.02.2025

Thierry Bontridder. Sculpteur de bijoux (1981-2024)

03.12.2024 > 11.11.2025