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Last week, Brussels Art Week’s inaugural full-city edition, RendezVous, animated the Belgian capital with exhibitions, performances, screenings and talks across more than 65 venues. Founded by curators Laure Decock and Evelyn Simons, the initiative transformed the city into a walkable constellation of art spaces spanning downtown, uptown and midtown neighborhoods. The week pulsed with ambition and wit, balancing international names with local voices and institutional heft with grassroots initiatives. And while many of the art week exhibitions remain open through October, the concentrated energy of the opening days set the tone for the city’s autumn art season, shaking off the summer lull.
Decock and Simons’ manifesto captures the ethos behind the project: “For us and for many, Brussels is a unique place. Conveniently central, discreetly humble—surrounded by big sisters such as London and Paris, but brimming with a creative energy that is ferocious… A city defined by an enriching diversity, a charming chaos, an avant-garde that has been going steady for over 100 years and where new trends inscribe themselves onto a canvas of strong art historical traditions.”
At the heart of the 2025 programming was The Tip Inn, a temporary salon conceived by Zoe Williams as artwork and gathering point. Equal parts dive bar, nightclub and installation, the venue had candlelit tables, satin curtains and an atmosphere pitched between decadence and parody. A monumental print of Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Prodigal Son (1536) presided over the room, while sausages hung like garlands and a video loop showed a girl casually relieving herself among glasses of champagne. Visitors ordered the artist’s signature whiskey-Montenegro cocktail, pocketed lighters inscribed with “Can I show you my portfolio?” and drifted between conversations, poetry readings, screenings and DJ sets.
Williams, a Marseille-based British artist, has long explored the performative dimension of hospitality. By staging a bar, she foregrounded the dynamics of service, consumption and rebellion, while The Tip Inn itself captured Brussels humor and irreverence, reminding everyone that art weeks need not be confined to white cubes.
RendezVous unfolded across three main zones. Downtown, centered around the city center and Molenbeek, there was a strong mix of historical reflection and contemporary experimentation. At Harlan Levey Projects, Amélie Bouvier’s exhibition “Stars, don’t fail me now!” (on through December 13) examined humanity’s enduring fascination with the cosmos. Working with archival solar images from the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, the Brussels-based artist transformed deteriorating glass plate negatives into meticulously drawn “photodessinographies.” Graphite and ink captured both celestial forms and the fragile material traces of scratches and fingerprints. Hanging textiles such as Astronomical Garden #1 and #2 extended this investigation into fictionalized landscapes, oscillating between scientific observation and poetic imagination.
Nearby, Galerie Christophe Gaillard opened “Le Contenu Pictural,” Hélène Delprat’s first solo show in Belgium (on through October 31). Borrowing its title from René Magritte’s irreverent ‘période vache,’ the exhibition highlighted Delprat’s own commitment to risk-taking and play. Alongside new works, rarely seen gouaches from the late 1990s testified to a two-decade hiatus in her practice, their intensity sharpened by that rupture. The presentation follows her major retrospective at Fondation Maeght and precedes a forthcoming exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2027.
Grège Gallery offered a different model altogether. Founded in 2021 by Marie de Brouwer, the initiative bridges art, design and architecture, and twice annually it hosts site-specific exhibitions in extraordinary locations—from medieval farmhouses to brutalist landmarks—while its Brussels space functions as a showroom and meeting point. For RendezVous, the gallery highlighted this nomadic, cross-disciplinary ethos, underscoring how entrepreneurial visions are reshaping Brussels’ cultural landscape.
Galerie Greta Meert revisited the late career of Sol LeWitt with “Bands, Curves and Brushstrokes” (through October 25). The works on paper from the 1990s and 2000s charted his shift from rigorous geometry to more fluid gestures, balancing spontaneity with systematic logic. Upstairs, the gallery previewed an online viewing room devoted to British artist James White. His forthcoming series “Indoor Nature” features photorealist paintings on aluminum, presented in plexiglass boxes, capturing domestic interiors where plants introduce subtle tension between artifice and vitality.
Ixelles, the heart of uptown Brussels, was buzzing. At Almine Rech, Kenny Scharf’s “Jungle jungle jungle” (on through October 25) presented the artist’s unmistakable universe of cartoonish ecologies and consumerist critique. Scharf, a veteran of the New York Downtown Scene that saw Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat rise to fame, continues to expand his cosmic pop language. Works such as JUNGLENIGHTZ (2025) exemplified his lush, frenetic engagement with nature, nightlife and dystopian exuberance.
Johanna Mirabel’s “I Wish,” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia through October 25, highlights the tradition of ex-voto painting. Drawing on both European and Latin American precedents, the French artist of Guyanese descent wove together sacred motifs and secular imagery. Scenes of disaster and recovery conveyed gratitude, anchoring her first Brussels solo exhibition in a rich cross-cultural lineage.
Bernier/Eliades Gallery showcased Martina Quesada with “If This Is a Space” (through October 25). Her geometric wall sculptures and pigment-on-paper works established rhythmic systems of variation and resonance. Pieces like The verge was always there (2025) interacted with shifting sunlight in the gallery, blurring distinctions between material presence and atmospheric suggestion.
At Xavier Hufkens, Charline Von Heyl’s debut exhibition in Brussels affirmed her reputation as one of the most inventive painters working today. The canvases danced between exuberance and rigor, improvisation and discipline. Rather than resolving into answers, they insisted on painting as an open-ended inquiry—a dialogue as mischievous as it is profound.
Moving toward midtown neighborhoods like Sablon, Forest and Saint-Gilles, Gladstone Gallery presented “In the Absence of Paradise,” Nicholas Bierk’s contemplative still lifes and portraits. Drawn from personal photographs, the Canadian artist’s oil paintings addressed grief, transformation and memory with understated intensity.
At Mendes Wood DM, Julien Creuzet unveiled “Nos diables rouges, nos dérives commotions,” his first Brussels solo show, on through October 25. Anchored by the figure of the Red Devil from Martinican carnival, the immersive installation combined films, wallpapers, sculptures and sound. Creuzet reimagined the masked body as a fluid, untamed entity traversing mythologies and diasporic histories. Rice, tridents and fragmented limbs recurred as potent symbols, layering ancestral spirituality with contemporary politics. His cosmology was unsettling yet emancipatory, opening unexpected pathways of imagination.
Design also had a strong presence. Spazio Nobile staged a joint exhibition by Kiki van Eijk and Joost van Bleiswijk, curated by Maria Cristina Didero. Celebrating two decades of collaboration, “Thinking Hands” highlighted the duo’s whimsical yet precise approach, rooted in Eindhoven’s design culture. Furniture, lighting and installations demonstrated how their practice resists mass production in favor of intuition and shared invention.
Institutional programming added depth. At WIELS, the group exhibition “Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order” explored ecological precarity through myth and dream. Curated by Sofia Dati, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert, it assembled more than thirty artists. Highlights included Gaëlle Choisne’s Ego, he goes, a talking fridge filled with decaying goods that critiqued consumer waste while invoking Creole cosmologies. Works by Marisa Merz, Cecilia Vicuña and Jumana Manna reinforced the exhibition’s call for alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.
Outside, Sharon Van Overmeiren’s The Farewell Hotel transformed the WIELS garden into an inflatable castle open to children and adults alike. Referencing pre-Columbian motifs, museological displays and Pokémon, the installation invited visitors to bounce, explore and reconsider what art can be. Its playful verticality epitomized the week’s spirit of porous boundaries between seriousness and delight.
RendezVous demonstrated how Brussels’ art scene thrives on contrasts—between the polished and the raw, the historical and the experimental, the institutional and the independent. It unfolded not just as a showcase of exhibitions but as a lived experience of the city itself, weaving fluidly through neighborhoods and communities. Far from another entry in the crowded calendar of art weeks, RendezVous affirmed Brussels’ singular position in the cultural landscape: cosmopolitan yet intimate, grounded in tradition yet insistently forward-looking. With this momentum, anticipation for next year’s edition is already mounting.
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Nicolas Vamvouklis
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