What to See During Art Brussels 2025

Rindon Johnson | Cultuurcentrum Strombeek | 28 February – 25 May

Seven mahogany grandfather clocks line the walls of ‘Why tell a dead man the future’, Rindon Johnson’s solo exhibition at Cultuurcentrum Strombeek. These readymade, minimalist works were inspired by Jennifer L. Anderson’s 2015 book Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America, which charts the obsession for this dark, exotic wood among wealthy Europeans and Americans during the mid-18th century, and the resulting colonial and ecological violence wrought upon regions of Central America and the West Indies by the mahogany trade. Johnson sourced his clocks from various antique stores across Europe. In the gallery, they stand poised like haunted witnesses to time, their ticking inner workings left exposed, and garish hand-painted details – bucolic European landscapes or merchant ships at sea – now chipped and fading. 

Matt Connors | Xavier Hufkens | 20 March – 17 May

Matt Connors’s cheerfully disorienting abstract paintings and drawings could easily backdrop an acid trip in a Chuck Jones cartoon. Grids regularly appear in Connors’s pictures, sometimes acting as organizing containers for the artist’s arrangements of polychromatic zigzags and nodules, which ultimately resemble stained-glass mosaics or windows opening onto landscapes of blistering colour. Elsewhere, grids become warped and distended subjects in themselves. The show’s title, ‘Mysterious Leap’, originates from Sigmund Freud’s description of the incomprehensible chasm separating mind and body. It’s an apt analogy for Connors’s undulating planes of kaleidoscopic pleasure, mapping a happy zone between logic and hallucination. 

Allison Katz | dépendence | 23 April – 31 May

René Magritte, whose birthplace is less than an hour from dépendence, looms over ‘CODEPENDENCE’, a solo show by Canadian painter Allison Katz. With her subtle, meandering textures and oblique symbolism, Katz carries Magritte’s painting-as-dream-as-semiotic-puzzle to eerie new heights. In The Great Below (2025), the vacant entryway to an unfinished attic throbs with ominous significance, while the painting’s composition of undecorated brown and off-white rectangles threatens to dismantle reality into nonfigurative abstraction. In Co-Creation (2025), an odalisque-like nude has been covered by two oblong voids rendered in black paint and sand, resembling the eyeholes of a stereoscope. Katz invites us to look through a pink body in repose to a jet-black desert beyond.  

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel | Z33 | 30 March – 24 August

Nearly everything about Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s immersive exhibition ‘The Wet Wing’ – from its silly title to a pink marble carving of a scuba fin fit to decorate an oversized fishtank – ripples with naive wonder. A series of algae-green ceramic vessels sits beneath the gallery’s arches. Their delicate, hand-worked detail lends them the mud-caked, snail-encrusted appearance of sunken treasure. On the walls hang several exquisite paintings on silk depicting freshwater mirror carp and one enormous catfish. The splotchy gloss of ink on silk gives these works a wobbly sheen, as if we are glimpsing the fish through clear shallow water. They are an ode to the gasping, bug-eyed beauty of the lowly bottom-feeder: you can almost taste the pond scum. 

Compound Lenses | Beige | 24 April – 31 May

Taking its name from the complex arrangements of multiple lenses found inside telescopes, microscopes and other optical equipment, ‘Compound Lenses’ gathers work by four Berlin-based artists: Sofia Duchovny, Nancy Lupo, Marina Pinsky and Gianna Surangkanjananajai. Tending towards minimalism and conceptualism, the works quietly pry apart our own systems of seeing. In Duchovny’s gorgeous, dizzying sculpture Not Titled Yet (2024), for example, a series of wood-mounted glass vitrines of diminishing size are placed one inside the other like Matryoshka dolls. The floating lines of wood and glass reassemble themselves into new symmetrical patterns as you move around the work, viewing it from different angles.

Jakob Brugge | Gauli Zitter | 19 April – 31 May

If commodification hinges on our ability to infuse ordinary objects with a mystical sense of uniqueness, Jakob Brugge seems invested in reverse-engineering the process. In Brugge’s deadpan sculptures, recognizable clothing items – such as track jackets, polo shirts, sailor suits and boy-scout uniforms – appear drained of their signifiers, purged of identifying patches or logos, and custom-framed in sterile display cases like pricey memorabilia. For his solo show at Gauli Zitter, Brugge produced colourful rubber moulds and casts of various middlebrow fashion accessories: a baseball cap, a deck shoe, a braided leather belt. He places these objects slumped together in plexiglass boxes (Real Life, 2025) or mounts them directly to the wall (Watch and Learn, 2025). Just beneath Brugge’s disconcerting humour lurk existential questions about the inert materials which construct a so-called individual. 

Hugo Roelandt | M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp) | 14 February – 1 June

A short journey from Brussels, a monumental retrospective at M HKA in Antwerp surveys the work of Hugo Roelandt, intrepid and highly prolific performer, sculptor, photographer and installation artist. Though a towering figure of the 1970s and ’80s Belgian avant-garde, Roelandt’s work remains underappreciated outside his home country. Early photographs, like Self Portrait in Drag (1974) and Projected Feelings Toward Something or Somebody (1974), present the artist’s own body as an endlessly manipulatable medium, while his ‘post-performance’ work of the 1980s staged elaborate choreography for nonhuman performers, including answering machines, electric fans, remote-controlled helicopters and windshield wipers. Arriving ten years after his death, ‘The End Is a New Beginning’, Roelandt’s first ever museum retrospective, reveals the artist to be a restless phoenix who reinvented his practice – and himself – at any given opportunity.

^{Main image: Hugo Roelandt, Untitled, 1970, installation view. Courtesy: © Estate of Hugo Roelandt and M HKA, Antwerp}