And soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

Ilse Michiels & Bart Luijten

11 January - 15 February 2025

Ilse and Bart have been a couple for over 30 years. Each of them has individually built a small collection, which, just like them, beautifully merges together. This exhibition at Life is Art now creates a cross-pollination. Through the specific arrangement, the different works complement each other and attempt to tell a story together. They collide, rub, strengthen, and communicate. With the theme of (false) memory and their particular fondness for mountains as a common thread.

Ilse Michiels (1970) took her first steps in formal exploration as a jewelry designer, but the canvas of the body quickly became too small. With clay, she searches for a new language of form around themes such as transience and forgetfulness. Through various treatments of the surface, she references nature, the human body, and its deteriorating mind. Inspired by a mountain holiday from her childhood, she created the series ‘containers of memory.’

As a graphic designer, Bart Luijten (1967) has always been fascinated by the grain in print, film, and analog photography. The shadows of noise, where barely anything happens, represent information to him: Noise equals information. Veils of black and white ash suggest bodies. The more the grain is enlarged, the more reality disappears, vibrating like the noise of electronic music or the random pixel pattern on a static TV screen. You discover the same negative space and energetic texture in the collages of fictional mountain landscapes and monochrome fever dreams.

Wednesday-Sunday
16:00-21:00
Or on appointment