MEAT!

From 31.01.2027 to 21.03.2027. Vernissage 31 januari from 2pm.

With works by:

Wim Delvoye, Nick Ervinck, Anne von Freyburg, Adrian Iurco, Stef Van Looveren, Joke Raes, Patrick Tresset, Tom Volkaert, Santiago Ydáñez, Danielle van Zadelhoff.

Meat! What is Meat? Parts of animals or of humans? A person as a whole, objectified into their matter? Is meat an object? Can meat be represented as an object and made tangible in different materials and media, just as the Greeks could bring to life a hand squeezing into a thigh?

Meat is something we consume, a body that is looked at. Lust, gluttony and greed, but also power, consumption and violence. Meat never comes into being without some form of violence, yet it is also what has nourished us throughout the history of humankind and around which rituals have been shaped.

Transience is often depicted in art through vanitas symbols. Certain contemporary artworks play with this: they are perishable themselves and consist, for example, of meat, an artwork that shows its own disappearance.

This exhibition does not seek a single answer to these themes and questions. It brings together artists who approach meat each in their own language: as image, as matter, as symbol and as mirror. Three common threads recur: meat in different media and materials, the objectification of the body, and vanitas symbolism as a reflection on mortality. All the works share a willingness to keep looking and investigating, where others might look away.

Santiago Ydáñez brings painting itself into the conversation. His work, previously shown at our gallery in the solo exhibition Visceral Memory, carries the heavy tradition of the painted body with it. In 2025 it was shown in Antwerp in dialogue with Rubens, Van Dyck, Snijders and Brueghel, masters for whom meat meant both sensory abundance and transience.

Daniëlle van Zadelhoff shows a hanging, split carcass, lit out of the darkness in a bare industrial space. In the sharp light, fat, muscle and rib become an almost painterly landscape. The pronounced chiaroscuro connects the photograph with Baroque painting, with Rembrandt’s slaughtered ox and with Soutine, and lets the still life and the crucified body resonate at once. She shows what we never see in daily life: the place where an animal becomes meat.

Nick Ervinck lets the organic emerge from the digital. He builds his forms with software and 3D printing, sometimes starting from images of human organs in medical handbooks, and lets them grow into swollen, twisting bodies of which it is unclear whether they have grown or been designed. He also reworks the lavish flesh of Rubens’ women into a structure that looks at once like skin, skeleton and code.

Wim Delvoye shifts the boundary between animal, object and decoration. In Mosaic he covers glossy white tiles with the same image of his own excrement, repeated and arranged into a symmetrical, ornamental pattern. Only on closer inspection does it dawn on us what we are walking on. Beauty and disgust, craft and revulsion become inseparably intertwined in Delvoye’s work. It exposes how naturally we use animals as raw material, and how thin the line is between craft, luxury and violence.

Stef Van Looveren places the knife that cuts through hearts at the centre. In How deep is your love, the question from the title is engraved in ornate letters and hearts into the blade. Sweet love and menace coincide in one object: love can run deep, just like a cut. The knife is a reminder that meat only becomes meat after an intervention, that desire and violence lie close together, and that a body can be looked at, touched and cut.

Anne von Freyburg questions the gaze on the female body with a material that itself feels soft and close to skin: textile. In her textile paintings, pastel and erotically tinged images from the Rococo, after Boucher and Fragonard, are rebuilt from glossy fabrics, sequins, fringes and embroidery. The female body is thereby both celebrated and dismantled. Self portraits and the objectifying of oneself through selfies also return in her work. In her flower series, based on Dutch still lifes from the seventeenth century, she asks who consumes what, and connects this question to vanitas symbolism.

Joke Raes brings a soft, tangible vulnerability into the exhibition, with a work in the form of a mirror, an enigmatic portrait. Her ceramic forms undulate, fold and swell, and deliberately leave open whether we are looking at an animal or a plant. Is this tissue, skin, organ or leaf? That doubt, in a formal language that feels fragile and feminine, blurs the boundary between species and reminds us that the living tissue of animal, plant and human lies closer together than we think. She thereby also raises the question of the place of the human, who imagines themselves to be the centre of the world.

Adrian Iurco often paints portraits that seem to consist entirely of meat. In his work the soul seems trapped in the perishable flesh of its own body. In this way he turns the theme of mortality inward, to the intimate experience of a person becoming aware of their own matter.
Vanitas symbolism then returns with Patrick Tresset and Tom Volkaert, each in their own way. Tresset has robots, no more than an arm with a pen at a desk, endlessly draw still lifes in which a skull and other vanitas symbols take centre stage. The machine looks, draws and starts again, a sober repetition that makes the passing of time tangible.

Tom Volkaert portrays a deep sadness, wrapped in colour and humour. Objects such as a cabinet, table and chair take on a cartoonish atmosphere, yet speak of illness, addiction and decay. His twisting, organic forms and saturated colours are playful on the one hand, yet seem to come from another planet on the other.

Together these works form an invitation: to see meat as a mirror, as a reminder of our own vulnerability. Because whoever looks at meat is ultimately looking at themselves.