Currently in Ghent
“A Legato or Your Perfect Hair In The Bathroom Sink, Adorning”
Jonas Dehnen
Opening Friday September 05, 2025
From 7 - 10 pm
September 20 - October 19
Jonas Dehnen (DE. 1992) presents A Legato or Your Perfect Hair In The Bathroom Sink, Adorning at Pizza Gallery Ghent.
The exhibition will present an extensive series of interrelated paintings developed over the last two years. The work has accumulated around a number of repeating motifs that triangulate a way forward whilst remaining constant vectors that gradually accumulate riffs and meaning(s) in an iterative and gradual process of picture making. As such, the works constitute diagrams (of a material process, memory and personal history), tokens (of the same things), bridges (between those same things), shelters (for those same things), islands in (and of) the world - all at once. The paintings will be accompanied by a collaborative piece of writing by Alicja Melzacka, Febe Lamiroy and Myrthe van der Mark.
Jonas Dehnen’s practice is stubbornly devoted to traversing the jaded landscape of painterly tropes and conventions. To him, the medium of painting feels like treacherous ground, despite the fact that it’s long been charted. Dehnen interrogates the way in which contemporary paintings and art objects in general performatively parade their purported authenticity.
Each work carefully follows its predecessors, in a slow and iterative picture-making process, in which visual themes grow and develop organically. This primarily plays out in paintings, drawings, and occasionally in three-dimensional work. Motifs drawn from literature intermingle with visual markers of identity. This might include pub signs, carnival floats, vernacular architecture, folk paintings and other elements of visual patois. These undergo a subjective examination led by the (im-)possibilities and the ‘cultural memory’ of the material and of matter itself.
︎ Jonas Dehnen
Upcoming in Antwerp
“AS I WALK I RESIST (Bang the drum and Fuck the gun)”
with Ria Pacquée
opening Friday October 17, 2025
from 7 - 10 pm
October 17 - November 09, 2025
︎ Ria Pacquée
Upcoming in Ghent
“Stab Candy”
with Rufus Michielsen & Tom Volkaert
opening Saturday November 22, 2025
from 6 - 10 pm
November 22 - December 14, 2025
Rufus Michielsen (b.1982) Resides and operates in Antwerp, Belgium. His oeuvre is equally informed by early modernist and Dadaist artists, Situationism, and CoBrA, as it is by the realms of graffiti, video games, and underground cartoons. This amalgamation serves as a touchstone for Michielsen's multifaceted expressions across various mediums: canvases adorned with paint or drawings etched onto paper, sculpture, and unconventional media.
His creations exist within the liminal space between abstraction and figuration. Michielsen revels in a playful exploration of anthropomorphism within the abstract forms that emerge from the strokes of paint. Often, he strives to encapsulate the sensation of a kind of sensory overload, akin to the experience of surfing the internet or strolling down the street. In his drawings, he endeavors to unearth a particular poetry inherent in that process.
Tom Volkaert’s (b.1989) sculptural work is a testimony to the materiality of memory as much as it is an ongoing tribute to the spiritual and shamanic force of art. Born in Antwerp in 1989, Volkaert’s sculptural work is a carefully balanced combination of refined artistic craftsmanship and the strategic use of unpredictability that comes into play when working with enameled ceramics, epoxy, or oxidized metal. Many of his works consist of circles on legs, which the artist likes to call steering-wheels. These works are like totems: symbolic and organic artifacts that make present the otherworldly alien life in the cosmos and that put us in touch with something radically different from us. On the edges and inside these circles, contorted arachnoid limbs, intestines, and sickly satanic tongues are carefully arranged and held in suspended animation. It is as if these circles are portals to another cosmic dimension and something wholly other than human life is trying to get through, a lumpy otherworldly and alienated organic gesturing at us in a way that feels both familiar and estranging.
But Volkaert’s so-called steering wheels are also a totem for his own life and memories, a way of navigating and coming to terms with his own life. For Volkaert, colors embody memory. Personal memories first of all. And thus, the lived memory of the cinereous cigarette stains on the caput morteem colored carpet in his parent’s living room is reenacted and relived through the use of these colors in his work. But universal memories too. The usage of umbilical greyish pink and placenta-colored red appeal to a birthing process all of us have gone through; engaging with these colors, Volkaert’s sculptures establish a connection to the matrixial mother in which all creativity is situated, making the viewer receptive to the most intimate and estranging experience of being alive.
Conjuring up these contradictory feelings and holding them together is, ultimately, at the core of Volkaert’s artistic practice. Holding together contradictory sensations, his art opens a space where feelings of joy, surprise, wonder, and disgust are enclosed in the same ceramic totem or metal cut-out or epoxy statues.
