Centrale presents the exhibition Mitja Tušek & Bertille Bak – Wait and see (10.04 > 24.08.2025)
Mitja Tušek‘s paintings and series are informed by references to the history of art and European culture, from the Middle Ages to Ensor and the Rorschach tests, whose forms recall the multitude of possible representations and perceptions of an image. Mitja Tušek’s paintings play with the codes of figuration and abstraction: figurative paintings touch on abstraction, while those that appear abstract often feature portraits or landscapes. The materials he uses – wax, lead, interference pigment – contribute through their power of absorption or reflection to an ambiguous perception of the image; we guess at it more than we see it, and yet we retain an almost palpable presence. Several series of large-format canvases allow us to embrace the diversity of forms that Tušek’s painting takes. It shifts the gaze, questioning the image and its double, the medium and its materiality, starting with the smallest particle of image, almost the pixel, which is zoomed in and enlarged, gaining in density with the successive layers applied by the painter over the years.
For this exhibition at Centrale, Mitja Tušek has invited the artist Bertille Bak. As a video and visual artist, Bertille Bak takes a committed look at the world, focusing on personal and collective narratives, questioning both the day-to-day reality of the communities she encounters and the representations we make of them. Through her installations and videos, “Bak doesn’t seek to create an illusion of realism but attempts to reveal what goes on behind the scenes in the construction of any image and to warn the public, in a tender but madcap way, that art is only make-believe.” (Exhibition Abus de Souffle, 2024, Jeu de Paume, Paris).
Exposition
Centrale
Place Sainte-Catherine 45
1000 Brussels
WED > SUN 10:30 > 18:00
Visual artist Caroline Le Méhauté and choreographer Isabella Soupart present Tellus Project, an installation-performance at the crossroads of art and biology, or bio-art. Bio-art is a contemporary art movement that uses the plastic resources offered by biotechnology as a medium. The project invites us to rethink our relationship with the living and to question our practices through art. Taking the earth beneath our feet as their starting point, the artists draw on the fact that 75% of our planet’s soil is now polluted. United by their shared concern for the environment and for materials, the duo is setting up in Centrale and is collaborating with a special material, polluted excavated earth.
Tellus Project is a research project initiated by Caroline le Méhauté. Based on this overwhelming observation, she is directing her research towards other practices. Phytoremediation is a gentle, slow method of helping to remedy this pollution. It involves the absorption of pollutants from the soil by hyper-accumulative plants, which are capable of filtering and degrading some of the pollutants. As well as being a symbolic and poetic act, creation can play a part in ‘’, in building resilience in the living world.
In Tellus Project, choreographer Isabella Soupart invites a group of dancers to take turns in a physical, rhythmic and spellbinding test of endurance, interacting individually or collectively as they confront the polluted earth that can no longer be ‘hidden’: piles of earth are shaped, transformed, moved and sculpted in turn. The audience is invited to share in this unique and hypnotic experience, individually defining their own time dedicated to this performance. Tellus Project is a dazzling choreography of bodies and sculptures/installations, endlessly reconfigured.
Exposition
Centrale
Place Sainte-Catherine 45
1000 Brussels
WED > SUN 10:30 > 18:00
My memories are stuck in the white part of your eyes
Fromto
Centrale | vitrine
Juan Agustin David Llosa
My memories are stuck in the white part of your eyes
23/01 > 30/03/2025
For Centrale | vitrine, Juan Agustin David Llosa presents an installation combining text and sculpture in ceramic, plaster and steel. Each element has been carefully shaped and selected to form a dreamlike landscape. Agustin plays with contrasting geometric lines and organic forms, recalling both forgotten cities and the bodies that wander through them. The eye can wander between shapes and shadows, wandering between words and white spaces.
The artist draws imaginary lines in the vitrine as if on a blank page. The poem “My memories are stuck in the white part of your eyes” evokes memories of lost objects, of places stuck between dreams and memory, petrified in the blankness of time.
Juan Agustin David Llosa (1998, Mendoza, Argentina) lives and works in Brussels. He graduated with a master’s degree in Sculpture and Art in Space from the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts of Brussels in 2024. He also has a bachelor’s degree in Illustration and Book Art from the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc.
The artist would like to thank L’OscilloBat workshop for its help in making the sculptures.
Exposition
Centrale | vitrine
Rue Sainte-Catherine 13
1000 Brussels
On the occasion of its reopening after refurbishing its spaces, Centrale presents the exhibition hosting (10.10.2024 > 09.02.2025).
hosting welcomes and celebrates the artistic diversity of the Brussels scene, opening up to the city, to its periphery, its artists and its audiences. The exhibition is presented as a large-scale cabinet of curiosities occupying all of Centrale’s spaces.
Inspired by the Summer Exhibition, an annual event held at the Royal Academy in London, hosting is an open call to Brussels-based artists of all generations and disciplines in the visual arts. The Brussels Art Centre is intent on welcoming artists from both the city’s center and its periphery, thus outlining the contours of a wider and more inclusive city, whose perimeter might be called, as says artist Pélagie Gbaguidi, the 20th commune of Brussels. The exhibition hosting questions the notions of hospitality, of territory, of solidarity and of emergence in today’s art ecosystem. Talks and performances will take place in connection with these questions.
The works are selected and curated by an artistic committee including guest artists Manon de Boer, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Juan Pablo Plazas and Richard Venlet, and Tania Nasielski, artistic director at Centrale.
A sale of the exhibited works is organized at Centrale, of which all proceeds go to the artists: a solidarity fund (20% of the proceeds) will be redistributed to all the exhibiting artists of hosting.
Artists :
Dareen Abbas, Özge Akarsu, Mohammed Alani, alias-nb, Nabil Aniss, Flavia Antoniazzi, Amaranta Aranda, Stephane Arcas, Mani Art, Yasmina Assbane, Krista Autio, Esther Babulik, Michèle Baczynsky, Bagnet, Koen Barra, Francesco Battistello, Marianne Behaeghel, Thomas Bernardet, Amélie Berrodier, Dani Bershan, Lucile Bertrand, Floris Boccanegra, Hugo Boccara, Edith Bories, Ariane Bosquet, Lucia Bru, Marc Buchy, Mirko Canesi, Marguerite Canguilhem, Frédéric Castiau, Louiz Castiella, Matthieu Chalmagne, Chameleonian Times, Clément Chantepie, Traian Cherecheș, Aliki Christoforou, Heather Clarke, Eva Claus, Florence Coenraets, Françoise Colpé, Suzanne Corcessin, Berenike Corcuera, Adeline Cros, Céline Cuvelier, Marta Dal Sasso, Amélie de Beauffort, Manon de Boer, Gert De Clercq, Karel De Cock, Hannah De Corte, Thomas De Decker, Yvonne De Grazia, Hamed Dehqan, Liesje De Laet, Brigitte De Mees, Ann De Nys, Eva Deceasstecker, Bernard Declercq, Gérald Dederen, Sara Del Bene, Rodolphe Delacourt, Deborah Deliens, Wolfgang Dengel, Yuna Denis, Ward De Ruddere, Ward Desloovere, Eli Desnot Marsan, Isabelle Detournay, Lena Dewaegenaere, Pablo Diartinez, Carlin Díaz, Thomas Dielman, Monique Dohy, Charlotte Dorn, Laura Dos Santos, Pétros Dourdoufis, Hughes Dubuisson, Celia Ducaju, Maria Dukers, Frédéric Dumoulin, Silio Durta, Lionel Dury, ECOLE MONDIALE (with Filip Van Dingenen), Hamada Elkept, Marius Escande & Sarah Illouz & Alexander Marinus, Élisa Espen, Marion Fabien, Gundi Falk, Lucia Femia, Brooke Ferguson, Colin Fincoeur, Anne Marie Finné, Igor Fouqueray, João Freitas, Philipp Fröhlich, Jean-Luc Gaffarel, Yannick Ganseman, Carmen Gayo Raton, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Pieter Geenen, Dirk Geets, Mark Gillioen, Clémence Godier, Maud Gourdon, Inès Guffroy, Elise Guillaume, Béatrice Guilleman, Fiona Guillemant, Luis Guzman, Ulla Hase, Elodie Hedouin, Michaël Henneaux, HIDDENBRILLAUD, Liliana Hoban, Camille Holdermann, Sophie Holmström, Brigitte Hoornaert & Stéfan Piat, Liudmyla Hots, Léon Huneau, Skender Hyseni, In Care Of, IOxOI, Victoria Iranzo, Chisato Ishiyama, Clément Jacques-Vossen, Marine Kaiser, Kled Kapexhiu, Kristell in Wonderland, Nancy La Rosa, Laurence Langlois, Sven Laurent, Raphaëlle Léaux, Julia Lebrao Sendra, Marie Fleur Lefebvre, Nicolas Magne Lefebvre, Ania Lemin, Lucas Loop, Luciana L. Schütz, Faber Lorne, Carole Louis, Hadrien Loumaye, Léo Luccioni, Anne Marie Maes, Lila Maitre, Lucie Malou, Thier Mans, Virgilio Martini, Nicolas Mayné, Thomas Mazzarella, Mélisande McBurnie, Hélène Meyer, Marie Michalikova, Marta Mo, Yukali Modéran, Hélène Moreau, Antoine Morice, Chrystel Mukeba, Anne Niveau, Rita Nobre, Christian Noirfalise, Ooops I Drew It Again, Marina Osadtchouk, Hamida Ouassini, Alice Pandolfo, Claudio Pantò, Flavia Parone, Adèle Pasquier, patrickvanghendt, BLAISE PATRIX, Pauvre Terre (Pauline Sesniac & Luca Reverdit), Sébastien Pauwels, Carmen Pazos Magariños, Nine Perris, Prune Perris, Dominique Piérard, Melissa Pinon, Nicolas Piret, plæd, Juan Pablo Plazas, Jérôme Porsperger, Céline Prignon, Anouk Rabot, Luka Rakol, Kamand Razavi, Alex Reynolds, Badi Rezzak, Marija Rinkeviciute, Matthias Roche, Lucas Roman, Jonathan Rosić, Amber Roucourt, Sandra Rouffignac, Valérie Rouillier, François Röze, Melissa Ryke, Elina Salminen, Patricia Sartori, Judith Scée, Valérian Schatten, Schizosteph, Amélie Scotta, Jimmy Scour, Anna Simon, Pierre Sohie, Lois Soleil, Nathan Solioz, Diane Stordiau, Straussphère, Laure Stroobandt, Merzedes Sturm-Lie, Laurent Suchy, TAMILA (Tengo Eminashvili), Malika Tarhach (malyqa), Erik Thys, Elio Ticca, Nina Tomàs, Morgane Trebus, Tim Trenson, ZETA TSERMOU, TUUURTLE (Dominique Raphaelle Ringler, Founder & Gaëtane Bibot & Sophie Lévy & Tania Wolski), Céline Vahsen, Anne van de Star, Charlotte Van de Velde, Ariane Van Dievoet, Leen Van Dommelen, Nadia van Gelder, Armand Van Mastrigt, Corin Vanden Berghe, Nathan Vandenberghe, luc vandervelde lux, Dimitri Vangrunderbeek, Lau Ve, Tatiana Vejic, Richard Venlet, Maj-Britt Verheijen Van Dyck, Laura Viale, Adèle Violette, Colin Waeghe, Antoine Waterkeyn, Susanne Weck, Saskia Weyts, WIP COLLECTIVE, Sarah Wouters, YAMABXL, Yonghi Yim, Anna Zanichelli, Eyad Zoudi.
Exposition
Centrale
Place Sainte-Catherine 45
1000 Brussels
WED > SUN 10:30 > 18:00
For Centrale | vitrine, Gladys Sauvage is questioning our relation with gesture and with the power to create by proposing a performative and evolving installation. A few streets away from the Grand-Place, the birthplace of lace-making, she creates a bobbin lace within the vitrine, just like Brussels’ lacemakers.
At the end of the 19th century, lacemakers still played with their bobbins in Brussels’ shop windows. The industrial era, followed by automatisation has made this craft almost obsolete. No longer profitable, lacemakers disappeared.
Gladys Sauvage builds her lace loom specifically for Centrale | vitrine. Designing and building her work tool is a way for the artist to reappropriate this craft. As an extension of her hands, she becomes one with her lace loom. Through this yesteryear technique and slow gesture, Gladys Sauvage questions the concept of mass production and profitability.
The lace or mycelium spreads throughout the vitrine. The artist is working there in real time at different dates: September 19 and 20, October 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 and November 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17.
Gladys Sauvage (1995, FR), lives and works in France.
Gladys Sauvage graduated with a Master’s degree in Tapestry and Textile Arts from the Académie royale des Beaux-arts de Bruxelles in 2020. She also acquired the Fashion Designer certificate at the Atelier Chardon Savard in Nantes. Bobbin lace is the medium at the heart of her artistic practice.
Exposition
Centrale | vitrine
Rue Sainte-Catherine 13
1000 Brussels
Centrale presents Maren Dubnick’s exhibition ACCUMULATOR at Centrale | vitrine (04.04 > 01.09.2024).
At a time when Centrale is undergoing a major transformation of its exhibition and public spaces, and reaffirming its new identity, Maren Dubnick (visual artist) and Clémentine Davin (curator) are reactivating the original function of the site, with the aim of offering a social and historical insight into the art centre which was once the first power station of the City of Brussels. Through an installation in Centrale | vitrine, the duo takes a look at the evolving use of electricity and its impact on contemporary society, creating a metaphorical link between the past and future lives of Centrale.
The artist-curator duo
Maren Dubnick, visual artist & Clémentine Davin, art historian and art critic, met in Brussels in 2018. Since then, they have been working together on a regular basis to develop their respective projects, and more specifically on issues relating to mediation and the place of art in society. They share many common concerns, but above all they share a keen interest in collaborative artistic approaches that aim to democratise art. In 2021, they are working together on a residency-laboratory project entitled “Axis-Mundi de l’ancrage au Monde”, supported by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles as part of its call for projects Un Futur pour la Culture 2021-22.
Maren DUBNICK (°1972, BE/DE) uses stacking and coiling strategies to question our relationship with time. Like a representation of infinity, her practice is based on a repetitive, even meditative process that requires both mastery and patience.
Clémentine DAVIN (°1985, FR) has worked alongside artists for many years, taking an active part in their exhibitions and projects. She is also a regular contributor to the art magazines l’art même and Flux News and, since 2022, has been a member of the board of the Fédération des Arts Plastiques (FAP).
With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
Exposition
Centrale | vitrine
Rue Sainte-Catherine 13
1000 Brussels
CENTRALE presents Antoinette d’Ansembourg‘s exhibition “From the ground, with love” at CENTRALE | vitrine (23.11.2023 > 17.03.2024).
Antoinette d’Ansembourg’s draws the timeless strangeness that emanates from her installations from the territory of the city, where new building sites blossom daily, ripping open buildings and excavating streets to expose the overhead or underground networks of cables that supply it with their fluids or electrical flows like a living being. In these areas off-limits to the public and of uncertain temporality, she notes the connections between rubble and plants that have the capacity to grow in hostile environments. She is sensitive to these changes in the nature of beings and things, to their transgenic potential. A “confrontation between human construction and the development of nature” is questioned by the artist in the very construction of her installations, where unspeakable mutations are forged and unnatural organisms are born, resulting from the improbable combination of the living and the waste.
With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
Sofhie Mavroudis presents the exhibition A bread in the wall at CENTRALE | box (23.11.2023 > 17.03.2024).
The artist questions the notion of transmission, particularly through language and traditions.
Starting from an incomplete knowledge of her father’s language, she uses gesture as the initiator of a change of state and confers – on the various objects thus created – a symbolism of their own.
Starting with a book written in Greek, the artist erases the words she does not understand. She seeks a creative process that allows the transformation of this object, which has lost its primary role of transmitting history, into a process close to resilience.
CENTRALE presents the group exhibition L’art de rien (23.11.2023 > 17.03.2024).
The group exhibition L’art de rien brings together artists, mostly from Brussels, who share a talent for the smallest gesture and a predilection for humble materials: for aesthetic and poetic purposes, they reuse and divert poor materials or restore dignity to ordinary, everyday objects – those that are discarded, once consumed, in the household chaos of the modern world. This selection of guest artists is completed – with humour and poetry – by a choice of works drawn from the collection of François de Coninck as well as from the formidable cabinet of contemporary curiosities of Galila Barzilaï Hollander, whose sensitive passion for the incongruous object is well known, with an emphasis on international artists.
” Works made from almost nothing touch me deeply. From Picasso’s bull’s head made of handlebars and a bicycle saddle to the fragile and poetic productions of Arte Povera, everything enchants me when poverty rhymes with generosity. Everything surprises me, questions me, amuses me and seduces me in this economy of means in the service of an artistic gesture. What makes your eyes smile makes you think. And it only takes a little to move and thus renew the way we look at things. Today, I am all the more sensitive to the poetics of the smallest gesture as current art seems to me to be marked, like other fields of production and consumption, by the proliferation of materials and expensive technological means, unfortunately often intended to impress the gallery. In contrast, the formal simplicity of works born of almost nothing gives added meaning, and beauty, to their tiny presence in this glitzy world.” – François de Coninck, guest curator
With the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
Exposition
CENTRALE | hall
Place Sainte-Catherine 44
1000 Brussels
WED > SUN 10:30 > 18:00
Antoine Waterkeyn‘s artistic practice manifests itself in the perpetual writing and rewriting of plots and narrative constructions. He plays with archetypes and characters from famous novels or from our collective memory. In his works, the narrative is deliberately left open to interpretation.
For his exhibition at CENTRALE | vitrine, Antoine Waterkeyn presents an installation of larger-than-life painted figures. The artist is inspired by the character of the monstrous figure in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and the Court of Miracles (La Cour des miracles) in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Based on these stories, Waterkeyn imagines a Eurovision competition for intellectuals, bringing together the winners of an atypical, little-awarded category: a collection of anti-heroes and villains from popular culture.
The artist takes us back to the marginalized figures of the Court of Miracles in the Middle Ages: beggars, hoodlums, vagabonds posing as cripples in the streets of Paris to deceive passers-by. As if by a miracle, at nightfall, they suddenly start walking normally, or regain their sight or the use of their limbs.
By gathering these iconic characters, Antoine Waterkeyn pays tribute to the anti-heroes of his collection. In this way, the artist holds up an inverted mirror of today’s dominant society to the passers-by of the Sainte-Catherine Street.
― Where am I? cried the affrighted poet.
― In the Cour des Miracles, replied a fourth spectre. who had joined them.
― Miracles, upon my soul, rejoined Gringoin, for here are blind who see and lame who run.
A sinister laugh was their only answer.
The poor poet cast his eyes around him. He was actually in that dreaded Cour des Miracles, into which no honest man had ever penetrated at such an hour; a magic circle, in which the officers of the Chatelet and the sergeants of the provost who ventured within it were disposed of in a trice; the haunt of thieves; a hideous wen on the face of Paris; a sewer disgorging every morning and receiving every night that fetid torrent of vice, mendicity, and roguery which always overflows the streets of great capitals;
a monstrous hive to which all the drones of the social order retired at night with their booty; the hospital of imposture where the gypsy, the unfrocked monk, the ruined scholar, the blackguards of all nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, of all religions, Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, idolaters, covered with painted wounds, beggars by day, transmogrified themselves into banditti at night; immense robing-room, in short, whither all the actors of that eternal comedy which theft, prostitution, and murder are performing in the streets of Paris, resorted at that period to dress and undress.
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), extract
Exposition
CENTRALE | vitrine
Rue Sainte-Catherine 13
1000 Brussels
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