Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present in Paris a solo exhibition devoted to Belgian artist Sophie Kuijken. This exhibition brings together a dozen of her recent paintings, shown at a major retrospective of her work at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de la Matmut - Daniel Havis (Saint-Pierre-de-Varengeville, France) until February 2026, tracing the history of a meticulous and eloquent artistic practice.
Drawn to ancient and modern art from a very young age, Sophie Kuijken has sought to develop a unique body of work, free from any form of imitation. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK), she made the radical decision to extricate herself from the art world to work hidden away in her studio for more than twenty years. This intentional retreat also involved staying away from exhibitions, specialist reviews and what was happening in the art world, with a view to preserving the autonomy and integrity of her pictorial language. Her work was revealed to the public in 2011 at a solo exhibition held at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, initiated by Joost Declercq, then director of the institution, who was captivated by the virtuosity and silent power of her painting.
The works presented are a continuation of the artist's research into portraiture, reflecting her long-standing fascination with faces and gazes. 'When I was a child, browsing through art books or visiting exhibitions, it was always the portraits that delighted me the most', confides Sophie Kuijken during an interview. She continues: 'After my studies, I initially tried to pull away from this obsession with portraiture [...], it was the late 1980s and portrait painting seemed a completely outdated genre. But for me, it quickly proved to be unavoidable. [...] Details that had nothing to do with the person gradually disappeared, until only the person remained.'
Thus, these isolated figures float in backgrounds that are sometimes monochromatic, impenetrable and devoid of any temporal or spatial reference. They are enshrouded in mystery: their titles are codes that only the artist can decipher, and their faces seem both strange and familiar, albeit impossible to identify. In fact, they are chimeras, created by combining assorted photographic fragments. Sophie Kuijken collects, reframes and overlays images gleaned from the internet - legs, eyes, fingers, accessories - to create new figures. This results in subtle discrepancies: an unusual skin tone, strangely elongated hands, an unexpected posture - details that captivate but also trouble the eye.
These fabricated anonymous figures offer a counterpoint to the history of portraiture, traditionally linked to the life model. Emerging from the uninterrupted flow of digital images, the figures find a moment of respite in the painting. They seem to be contained, as though frozen, in these spaces; yet, over time, the eye perceives that the medium itself, in its slow deterioration, introduces subtle morphological distortions: figures and flesh stretch. These variations evoke the Mannerism of the Italian High Renaissance, notably in Parmigianino's work, where the distortion of the body suggests a state of constant transformation, as though nothing were permanent for human beings.
'I do not portray his being, I portray his passage', wrote Michel de Montaigne in his Essays (1595). By invoking both the memory of the great pictorial tradition and contemporary digital images, Sophie Kuijken resonates with this idea of movement and transformation. The exhibition thus reveals a form of painting that explores liminal space, where identity is never fixed. Displayed at eye level, these figures establish a face-to-face interaction, drawing the viewer into an experiential encounter. Contemplating Sophie Kuijken's work, Marc Donnadieu asks the question: 'What do we see of the world around us, of its present and past, its history and memory, of the people that have peopled it and still people it? Do we truly look at his vaster world in which we are included and does it observe us?'¹.
- Marie Chappaz
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¹Marc Donnadieu, Le don d'une présence au monde, in Sophie Kuijken, monograph (Brussels: Éditions Racine, 2018), quoting Georges Didi-Huberman, 'We need to close our eyes in order to see when the act of seeing sends us to and opens an abyss that watches us, concerns us, and somehow constitutes us.', Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1992).
