BRUSSELS.- Galerie Baronian announces a new exhibition by Leen Voet. After her successful exhibition at Museum M in Leuven in the spring of 2023, the artist will exhibit new works from two different series in Brussels. Both series refer to her traditional art school programme at the Turnhout Heilig Graf Institute under the leadership of Bert Vandael.

Leen Voet’s Bert Vandael series, consisting of a watercolour from her youth and a recent revival in oil, has been an ongoing process for several years and will ultimately become a series of sixty works. The watercolour is a relic from her youth in the late 1980s. At the Heilig Graf Institute in Turnhout, under the guidance of her teacher Bert Vandael, she had to create sixty watercolours that faithfully depicted reality. She predominantly painted landscapes from her immediate environment. The new versions of the landscapes, each based on the composition of one of the watercolours, are created according to a geometric system of diagrams, planes and lines in oil paint. It provides balance and creates a good contrast to have the traditional watercolours on the right on the one hand and contemporary canvas on the other, thus interweaving the present and the past. She incorporates the traditional method that she has always appreciated, but she also rebels against it by putting her own unique twist on the canvas. But primarily by turning both works 90 degrees anticlockwise.

The second series that the artist presents is three self-portraits from a series of six, entitled Heilig-Graf, Portrait. They are based on a painting in tempera that she created in 1988, also during her training. She showed her first self-portrait on canvas at Museum M, a version in black and white paint. The present and the past also intertwine here, as the portrait shows her as a young girl.

Leen Voet’s work is often about contradictions. About looking back at the past and looking ahead to the future at the same time. The demand for the innate talent of an artist and the formation of an artist through training. Following the rules of art history, but also deviating from them.

Leen Voet’s work is in one way or another always concerned with the fundamental question of who is allowed to be an artist and why, and what an oeuvre is. Her works ask the observer what our affective bond is with the things that surround us. On the one hand, she examines the relationship between figuration and meaning, and on the other hand, the contrast between emotional understanding and the motif and concept. Her pictorial style, characterised by geometric shapes and vibrant colours, is freed from any associative meaning.

Through the portraits in the exhibition, Leen Voet looks at us and follows us through the exhibition. She greets us. She shows us that the artist is present, in whatever capacity that may be.