Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Oisterwijk

An immersive exploration of the ocean's depths, featuring large-scale photographs and multimedia installations.

I don't believe in ultimate perfection. I believe in a beauty that arises only when there are certain irregularities in the composition. MPV Gallery is pleased to announce the new solo exhibition by Belgian artist Stief Desmet (1973, BE). Starting May 9, the gallery will present a selection of recent paintings and sculptures - works that reflect an artistic practice in constant flux, effortlessly crossing boundaries between media. Stief Desmet investigates the complex interplay between nature and culture. How does humanity manipulate nature, and how does nature turn that manipulation back on us? Desmet grew up in the Leie region of East Flanders, Belgium, in a landscape that has shaped generations of Flemish painters. After journeys through Asia, Canada, and Los Angeles, he returned to Deinze, where he lives and works on a former pig farm converted into a complex of studios and living spaces. He has fully absorbed the lesson of regional peers Roger Raveel and Raoul De Keyser: a universal body of work can be built from a provincial town, provided one looks deeply enough at what is close at hand. His practice moves perpetually between two worlds: the hectic, consumption-driven society he inhabits and a deep longing for a utopian natural state. From this tension he produces paintings, bronze and concrete sculptures, ceramics, screen prints, and performances. He does not consider himself a painter or sculptor in the strict sense, he searches, he gleans, he assembles. As a point of departure, he recuperates iconic images from our collective memory and combines them with botanical elements found in his immediate surroundings and industrially fabricated building materials. Objects ripen in the studio, sometimes for months, before finding their definitive place in a work. Nature in Desmet’s work is never an idyllic backdrop but an active interlocutor. Freezing the transient, preserving the fragile - these are among the central driving forces of his practice. A dead branch in the forest disappears in months; cast in bronze, it remains forever that same branch. His sculptures are explicitly designed to weather: sea salt, rain, the hands of passers-by all complete the work. Set against this is culture in all its layered complexity. Greek mythology and art history are indispensable tools for Desmet, anchoring his work in a millennia-long conversation about the relationship between humanity, nature, and the cosmos; a conversation he does not resolve but keeps alive, holding tradition and innovation, beauty and destruction, in deliberate tension. Desmet has exhibited worldwide. His work is held in national and international collections and in the public realm.

Gerben Mulder's paintings ride the razor's edge between figuration and abstraction, and while carrying on a long painting tradition, they possess a dynamic freshness. MPV Gallery is proud to present a new solo exhibition of recent paintings by Gerben Mulder, on view from 9 May through 27 June 2026. Born in Amsterdam in 1972, Mulder has lived and worked between New York and Rio de Janeiro since moving from the Netherlands to the United States in 1993. A self-taught painter, his Dutch roots keep him closely connected to European art, while his time in New York and Brazil infuses his work with an unmistakable expressiveness. The new oil paintings on view at MPV Gallery this spring span two of the artist's defining subjects — the human figure and the flower — yet are united by the same raw, urgent energy that has long made Mulder's work impossible to ignore. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith situates Mulder's work in the gap between Raoul Dufy and Jackson Pollock — between essentially figurative painting with traditional themes on the one hand, and abstract expressionism on the other. His spiral brushstrokes, graphic-like and retro-modernist in their mark-making, bring a contemporary edge to these classic genres, while his iridescent palette emphasises the psychological dimensions of his subjects — melancholy and euphoria held in equal measure. The works on show are among his most recent — fresh from a period of intensely physical painting in which Mulder converts the studio itself into an extension of the canvas, working oneiric narratives into the surface through considerable effort and sheer painterly instinct. Mulder's work has been shown internationally at venues including Art Basel, Frieze London and New York, the Armory Show, MOCA Tucson, Kunsthal Kade in Amersfoort, and Kunstverein Cologne, and is held in public and private collections across the USA, Europe, South America and Asia. The exhibition opens on 9 May 2026 and runs through 27 June 2026.