Gallery Sofie Van De Velde

Join us for a vibrant group exhibition showcasing the work of emerging and established artists. This diverse collection of works explores new horizons in contemporary art, pushing boundaries and challenging conventional norms.

Explore the captivating world of perspective in this comprehensive exhibition featuring works from our collection and loans from other institutions. Discover how artists have used linear, atmospheric, and color perspectives to create depth and illusion on canvas.

Christopher Colm Morrin’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, “White Room”, opens on March 28. Working on intimate canvases, Morrin builds paintings that invite slow attention. They operate in the space between how something looks and what it physically is, allowing meaning to form gradually through that tension. Each body of work emerges from a desire to stay close to experience itself. The works in White Room resist fixed interpretation. They often remain provisional arrangements of paint, grounded in presence rather than image. This reduction signals a quiet shift in Morrin’s language. In White Room nr. 1 (2026), white oil paint covers the canvas as the jute’s grid rises through it, crossed by a single Prussian blue line that marks space without fully defining it.

In Eye to Eye, Dittmar Viane explores the complex relationship between humans, animals and nature. Throughout history, we have influenced one another in ways that are sometimes caring and admiring, and at other times controlling or destructive. Animals have shaped how humans understand nature, belief, science, and beauty, just as human actions have shaped animal lives. In Viane’s paintings, humans and animals face each other directly. To be eye to eye suggests equality or understanding, but these encounters are rarely comfortable. Instead, they expose tensions between care and control, admiration and responsibility. The animals return the viewer’s gaze with strength and presence, while human figures are subtly exaggerated or placed in uncertain roles. Rendered with a light, playful touch and a hint of satire, the works balance humor with discomfort. Eye to Eye invites viewers to reflect on their own position in this shared history, and to recognize themselves in the gaze of the other, human or animal.

Yee considered modesty and simplicity essential conditions for beauty. She had no interest in grand statements; her work speaks through quiet but determined gestures. In both her art and her clothing, a natural sense of movement emerges. A s if the work remains open and breathing. For Yee, process was more important than outcome. Marina Yee leaves behind a distinctive and coherent body of work that resists trends and conventions. A n oeuvre grounded in intuition, integrity, and stillness.

Silent Talk presents the work of two painters Cristof Yvoré and Ilse D’Hollander, creating a silent dialogue between two artists, who have never met. Their respective practices resist easy categorization — neither strictly abstract nor conventionally representative —and expand the possibilities of what painting can reveal about memory, vision, and reality. Their paintings, never large in scale, share an absence of the human figure, affirming painting as a mode of thought, a poetics of silence, and a meditation on presence. In the hushed eloquence of their images, we encounter not emptiness, but an invitation to dwell, reflect, and perceive with heightened awareness. Within the contemporary field of painting— where figuration often contends with the pressures of narrative and spectacle —the bodies of work by Cristof Yvoré (1967–2013) and Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997) delineate an austere yet profoundly resonant territory. Born in different geographies — Yvoré in France and D’Hollander in Belgium — their practices intersect in an almost uncanny manner. Both artists died young, leaving behind bodies of work marked by quiet hermeticism and a deep poetic engagement with the act of painting itself. In their respective oeuvres, the human figure is absent, yet presence is strongly felt through the atmospheric charge of paint, memory, and space. This exhibition brings these two singular voices into dialogue, inviting viewers to consider not only the affinities between their approaches but also how their differences illuminate distinct modes of abstraction and perception. Central to both Yvoré’s and D’ Hollander’s work is an attentiveness not to the human figure, but to what remains in its absence. Yvoré’s canvases are populated by everyday objects — vases of flowers, empty plates, corners of rooms, curtains, architectural fragments — yet these elements exist in an isolated sphere, stripped of narrative context and devoid of explicit human presence. His compositions radiate an existential stillness, as if the depicted objects were relics of a familiar domesticity suspended in time. Yvoré’s method of working “ solely from memory,” as he often stated in interviews, reinforces this introspective distance : he does not paint what he sees, but what lingers in the mind’s eye. The dense materiality of his paintings, built through successive layers of pigment, absorbs rather than reflects light, generating a compressed, almost claustrophobic space in which objects acquire a sculptural weight. Ilse D’ Hollander’s practice, while similarly eschewing figuration, unfolds through a more liminal negotiation between abstraction and evocation. Her paintings hover on the threshold between representation and pure painterly matter, manifesting spaces of emotion rather than identifiable scenes. D’Hollander paints places, flowers, and seemingly abstract fields that never fully resolve into recognizable landscapes ; instead, they function as afterimages of physical sensations — horizons, weathered skies, terrains glimpsed during solitary walks through the Flemish countryside. Her work demonstrates exceptional mastery of surface and gesture, where subtle modulations of colour and layered brushwork evoke both place and emotions without resorting to explicit depiction. Her canvases thus become sites of contemplation, where colour fields and forms hover just beyond full comprehension, offering a poetic resonance of the world rather than its illustration. For both artists, the physicality of paint is not a vehicle for storytelling but a site of existence. Yvoré’s canvases are heavily worked surfaces, where accumulated layers of pigment blur the boundary between figure and ground. Thick impasto and restrained tonal variations transform commonplace subjects into meditative objects of visual thought. Rather than dissolving into abstraction, these surfaces generate a palpable tension between presence and void, echoing the silent inflections of everyday life held in suspension. D’ Hollander’s works, by contrast, are defined by a delicate negotiation of light, hue, and gesture. She coaxes evocative impressions of atmosphere, weather, and spatial tension into modestly scaled canvases. Often beginning from monochrome or near-monochrome spaces, her paintings are subtly interrupted by blocks of colour or fleeting brushstrokes that suggest transient perceptions. This meticulous layering records an experience of looking —a painterly recollection of sight, memory, and thought. D’Hollander herself wrote that a painting comes into being when “ ideas and the act of painting coincide,” asserting a philosophical intimacy between the painter’s presence and the material act of painting. Instead, Yvoré’s empty interiors and anonymous still lifes evoke a memory of being rather than a record of seeing, as if each object carried the residue of lived experience without narrative articulation. His paintings are imbued with a quiet philosophical intensity —an invitation to remain within the image, attentive to its lingering

In OHNE, her fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Sofie Van de Velde, Karin Hanssen presents a series of new paintings that respond to the tensions of our time, yet simultaneously resolutely seek possibilities for connection. The title OHNE refers to a period of uncertainty and transition, in which familiar frameworks disappear and new forms of coexistence emerge. The artist works with recognizable symbols and historical references that resonate with existing narratives on contemporary themes such as groupthink, leadership, censorship, propaganda, and solidarity. Images of passageways, bridges, borders, and architectural structures suggest movement, but also obstruction and detours. Without moralizing, the artist explores how power, status, and collective imagination shape our daily actions. Hanssen examines how individuals and communities relate to each other in a world dominated by polarization, but where empathy, intuition, and solidarity remain equally present. OHNE can therefore also be read as 'without': without hatred, without exclusion, without preconceived conclusions.

There are several reasons to bring together the work of Roger Raveel and Marcel Broodthaers. They belong to the same generation. Both were born in the early 1920s and shared the same historical context. As artists, they each chose an idiosyncratic position within that period. They aligned themselves neither with the existential seriousness that characterized many of their contemporaries, nor with the artists fascinated by economic expansion and its imagery. Instead, they operated between these extremes, in a space where distance, nuance, and an almost quiet form of resistance are central. For this presentation, we began with the selection of available works by Broodthaers from the collection of Ronny Van de Velde. The Raveel drawings were not chosen on the basis of formal parallels, but rather from a shared stance—a resonance in artistic attitude. This presentation forms part of a series of exploratory exercises that seek to further question and illuminate Raveel’s oeuvre through different formal and conceptual themes.