KNOKKE.- This Summer in Knokke Maruani Mercier celebrates the extraordinary artists who have shaped the gallery since its founding in 1995.

During the last 30 years with more than 300 exhibitions and multiple noted publications, Maruani Mercier has nurtured the careers of some of the most significant contemporary artists of our time.

The gallery has been proud over the decades to collaborate with artists like Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Ron Gorchov, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Tony Matelli, Arne Quinze and Lyle Ashton Harris, showing new and groundbreaking bodies of work through multiple solo presentations.

Since its inception, Maruani Mercier has also provided a platform and subsequent long-term representation for an extensive and diverse group of younger artists who have risen to international recognition, among these, Jaclyn Conley, Titus Kaphar, Hank Willis Thomas, Samuel de Saboia and Kasper Sonne. The gallery has seen their work placed in many museum and institutional collections.

The gallery has been a leading voice in championing artists across continents, providing residencies and introducing the work of Victor Ehikhamenor, Kwesi Botchway, Emmanuel Taku and Johnson Eziefula among others, to both Belgian and International audiences by including them in over 120 art fair presentations worldwide.

The artists have collectively shaped the gallery’s past and present, and the gallery looks forward with them to forging the future.

Alongside 30 Years, Maruani Mercier presents Masters of Surrealism, unveiling masterpieces by the movement’s most visionary minds. This continues the gallery’s established tradition of mounting significant historical exhibitions of artists such as Man Ray, Calder and Miró.

JACLYN CONLEY´

In her dynamic portrayals of human form, Jaclyn Conley fuses references to iconic art historical images with poignant reflection on the social and political concerns of American life. Drawing on archival photographs of ordinary people gathering in hope or in protest amid twentieth-century political upheavals, Conley constructs social history paintings of the present moment. The artist methodically locates documentary images in remote archives, unearthing anonymous scenes to interrogate the notion of national self-image and its influence on one’s sense of self: “What I find most interesting about these archive collections, other than the often candid documentation, is that they were created in order to give Americans a picture of themselves.”

Often turning to images of crowds or communities at political rallies, festivals, or social events, Conley seeks to ‘inhabit’ each individual subject via her deliberately slow and considered painting process. Rooted in archived images, yet compositionally referencing works by Gustav Courbet, Peter Bruegel, James Ensor, among others, the paintings explore the historical as well as universal forces that can bring people together or pull them apart in times of socio-political crisis. Alternating vigorous gestural marks with areas of nuanced brushwork, Conley constructs composite, almost fragmented images to slow down the process of reading the painting for the viewer and allude to her diverse visual sources. Resisting a language of painting that would suggest a seamless picture, the artist previously painted on panels which she cut and collaged to build the composition, turning to painting on canvas in her recent body of work.

Jaclyn Conley (b. 1979) was born in Ontario, Canada, and is now based in New Haven, CT. Conley has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Painting Center, NY, NurtureArt, NY, Projective City, Paris, Wynick-Tuck Gallery, Toronto, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield CT. Conley has been an artist in residence at NXTHVN, the Vermont Studio Center and The Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver Canada. Conley has received grants including a Connecticut Office of the Arts Fellowship, Canada Council for the Arts Visual Arts Project Grants, an Elizabeth Greenshields Award and a Fellowship from the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. Her work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and New American Painting.

KASPER SONNE

Kasper Sonne (b. 1974 Copenhagen, Denmark) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation in 2000 and has for the past fifteen years been living and working between Copenhagen and New York. With roots in design and graffiti, Kasper Sonne spent years making large, bold figurative paintings, before turning to abstraction as a way to fully explore the qualities of medium, without being beholden to narrative. In a more recent return to figuration for the artist, the new works manifest an intersection of both interests, as Sonne continues to focus on painterly qualities of color, line, and form, while re-introducing figural elements.

Throughout his practice, Sonne has continuously investigated the way we interpret our surroundings and make sense of the world we live in by purposefully constructing and deconstructing reality. Many of Sonne’s paintings tap into the horizon line as a limiting form. So often used to symbolize boundlessness, for Sonne the horizon is a space of rupture where the sky meets its limit at the sea, a field, or some more recent structure. Within his vibrantly colored paintings, anonymous figures and lone trees (functioning as stand-ins for human protagonists) are placed amid natural and built environments, displaced from both their own world and from that of the viewer.

In Sonne’s paintings, the solitary figures are beholden to the structural geometries that surround them. Sonne frequently uses architecture to create a shallow compositional field, creating a sense of theatricality within his works. Sonne’s figures are sometimes depicted from a great distance, imbuing compositions with a sense of melancholia or isolation.

Kasper Sonne’s exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at museums and galleries such as Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2023), A Hug From The Art World, New York, US (2019), Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2018), HEART Museum, Denmark (2016), The Arts Club, London, UK (2015), West, Den Haag, Netherlands (2014), Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2014); SALTS, Basel, Switzerland (2013), The Hole, New York, US (2013), Primo Piano, Paris, France (2012), SAPS museum, Mexico City, Mexico (2010) and V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2009), as well as group exhibitions at MARUANI MERCIER, Brussels, Belgium (2023), Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021), Collaborations Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018), Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy (2016), Fergus McCaffrey in New York, US (2015); Kunstverein Kolnberg, Cologne (2015), Germany; Den Frie - Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2015), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, US (2014); National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy (2014), Centre d’art Contemporain, Clichy, France (2014), Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, US (2014); The Moving Museum, Dubai, Emirates (2013), Gl. Holtegaard – gallery for contemporary and modern art, Denmark (2013), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2012), Bass Museum of Art, Miami, US (2011), Museo de San Carlos, Mexico City, Mexico (2008), Seventeen Gallery, London, UK (2007) and Galerie Krinzinger, Wien, Austria (2006).

SAMUEL DE SABOIA

Samuel de Saboia (b. 1998, Brazil) is a mixed media artist and creative director known for works that address existential dichotomies such as life and death, pain and pleasure, and virtue and vice. The artist’s vibrant, energetic paintings also relay fragments of his own personal narrative as he explores themes including sexuality, migration, and displacement. de Saboia began painting and selling his work online at an early age. In 2019, Brazil’s FAMA Museum mounted de Saboia’s first solo museum exhibition. Many of de Saboia’s notable works feature the prominent outline of a central face or figure tangled amidst various other intricate patterns and shapes.

DAVID LACHAPELLE

American artist David LaChapelle is known for his visually striking, provocative imagery fueled with surrealist overtones and elaborate decoration. His highly detailed works convey socially relevant messages that contemplate themes such as pop culture, mortality, and religion.

TONY MATELLI

Characterized by hyperrealism and a twisted depiction of everyday objects like flowers and leftover consumer goods, Tony Matelli's sculptures often straddle the boundaries of absurdity and humor, raising broader existential questions. Born in 1971 in Chicago, Tony Matelli is a New York-based sculptor known for his painstakingly detailed, resemblant sculptures. Concerned with how we define ourselves as human beings, what constitutes meaningful relationships, and the transience of life, Matelli chronicles these ideas through a playful lens whilst pushing the boundaries of his medium. The result is a subversive dialogue that deepens the conversation surrounding the possibilities of sculpture.

KATE GOTTGENS

In Kate Gottgens’ paintings, light and shadow dissolve into each other, forming liminal spaces that hover between memory and dream. Figures emerge and recede, absorbed by their surroundings, their presence both familiar and elusive. The setting, inspired by one of Kate’s own photographs, depicts an artificially lit pool embedded within the natural landscape. This tension between the manufactured and the organic is central to the work. At its core, the painting speaks to divine feminine power, a contemporary "Birth of Venus". There is an ethereal strength in the figure’s emergence, an almost embryonic quality, as if suspended in a state of transformation. The pool itself takes on the role of an amniotic sac, a space of potential and becoming.

BEA SCACCIA

"I paint artifices. My focus has always been the act of masking, of covering up, of literally putting oneself together. From my early passion for Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, I could have guessed that my path would have gravitated around those themes. I am interested in representing our shapeshifting, dramatic, transformative selves. I’ve read about myths and fairytales, about metamorphosis and archetypes. I paint signifiers of artificial beauty, and we all know how feminine beauty can easily turn monstrous in our society. Women have been othered for centuries—in literature, visual art, and culture in general. " — Bea Scaccia

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

In collaboration with the celebrated Italian portraitist Francesco Clemente, some of the world’s most iconic women are reimagined as timeless works of art. Known for his deeply expressive and psychologically charged portraits, Clemente brings a dreamlike intensity to each sitter, fusing observation with intuition.

Iman (2015) was the first in this series, marking the beginning of a project in which beauty, identity, and presence converge. As both a fashion icon and a cultural figure, Iman Bowie embodies a layered persona that Clemente captures with intimacy and reverence. His brushwork, often fluid and emotionally resonant, lends the portrait a mythic dimension. Iman appears not merely as a model, but as a muse, a symbol, and a subject rendered with poetic sensitivity.

PAM GLICK

For Glick, the paintings are often rooted in and respond to a particular landscape, projecting the experience of natural phenomena. Having lived in Buffalo, in the vicinity of Niagara Falls for many years, the artist has described the sight as ‘the perfect blend of physical and spiritual’ and as an important inspiration in her practice. Animated by the verve of the uninterrupted rhythmic gesture, Glick’s paintings emerge through improvisation and free association. As the artist observed, “It’s knowing something very deeply, and yet always being surprised by it.”

GAVIN TURK

Gavin Turk’s installations and sculptures playfully recontextualize everyday objects, addressing issues of authorship, authenticity, and identity.

I don’t think I ever really decided I was an artist. I went to college to learn how to think and look at art. In the end, I developed a more sophisticated misunderstanding of art. – Gavin Turk

ALLAN MCCOLLUM

Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist whose work often blurs the boundary between unique artifacts and mass production. Interested in how objects attain cultural value, McCollum’s Surrogate Paintings are uniquely produced yet intended to seem manufactured, questioning both the process of labor and the value of authorship. Employing plaster, rubber, and cement, he has created sculptures resembling framed paintings, fossilized bones, antique urns, and household objects.

PAUL MOGENSEN

The enigma of Paul Mogensen’s compositions derives from his engagement with the abstract science of mathematics. Though often associated with his minimalist contemporaries of the 1960s and 70s, the New York-based artist’s work defies categorization.

ARNE QUINZE

The unbridled beauty of nature, along with the various cultures he encounters through his travels are pertinent to Arne Quinze’s undertaking as an artist. At its very core, his work is a reflection on these themes intertwined with a persistent end goal of reinvigorating our often-monotonous urban environments. From drawings to paintings to massive public installations imbued with bold flashes of color, his message is unequivocally optimistic.

Quinze was born in Belgium in 1971, currently residing near Ghent. His start as a graffiti artist in the 1980s made him realize that cities can act as open-air museums, an idea which resounds to this day. Ever since he has been fascinated with the way art can engage with people in the public sphere, and how it can subsequently unite them in harmony.

ROSS BLECKNER

Ross Bleckner, born in 1949 in New York and raised in the affluent town of Hewlett Harbor on Long Island, is a prominent artist whose work has explored the fragility of life, particularly in the context of the AIDS crisis that gripped New York in the 1980s. His paintings are meditations on change, loss, and memory, with recurring themes of the body, health, and disease. As Bleckner himself put it, “The idea that the body is so perfect, until it’s not perfect. It’s a fragile membrane that separates us from disaster.” This contemplation on life’s impermanence has made his art resonate deeply, whether through abstract stripes and dots or representational imagery of birds, flowers, and brains. His iconic multicolored circles, or "cells," smoothly layered on dark gray backgrounds, evoke the appearance of blood droplets or microscopic molecules, creating a hypnotic and disorienting effect.

Bleckner studied under Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close at New York University, earning a BA in 1971, followed by an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1973, where he met David Salle. Upon returning to New York in 1974, Bleckner moved into a Tribeca loft that became a creative hub, shared with fellow artist Julian Schnabel and housing the Mudd Club, a popular gathering spot for musicians and artists. His early Stripe paintings of the 1980s, an homage to Bridget Riley, were not well-received by critics. However, he found his voice in works that addressed the AIDS crisis, producing memorial-like paintings with imagery such as candelabras, chandeliers, and rococo motifs against dark backgrounds. His use of dots in some pieces suggested the lesions caused by AIDS-related sarcomas, underscoring his response to the devastation of the epidemic.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bleckner’s work expanded to include the Constellation and Architecture of the Sky series, invoking celestial imagery and domed interiors. Around this time, he also began his Cell paintings, focusing on diseased human cells, a motif that became personal when his father lost his battle with cancer. His continued interest in the microscopic aspects of the body is evident in his representations of DNA and cancer cells. Bleckner also explored other motifs, including a series of bird paintings between 1995 and 2003, and experimented with different surfaces and techniques, such as the airbrush.

At the age of 45, Bleckner became the youngest artist to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995. His work is held in numerous prestigious collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His exhibitions have spanned globally, with shows at institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, Reina Sofia in Madrid, L.A. County Museum in Los Angeles, Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland, and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Bleckner continues to live and work in New York, where his art remains a powerful exploration of life, disease, and memory.

In the past decades Bleckner has become well known his support of humanitarian causes, including the fight against AIDS. He is also the first artist to have been appointed Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations, in 2009.

PETER HALLEY

Peter Halley was born in New York in 1953. He received his BA from Yale University and his MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1978. Moving back to New York City had big influence on Halley’s painting style. Its three- dimensional urban grid led to geometric paintings that engage in a play of relationships between so-called "prisons" and "cells" – icons that reflect the increasing geometricization of social space in the world. Halley began to use colors and materials with specific connotations, such as fluorescent Day-Glo paint, mimicking the eerie glow of artificial lighting and reflective clothing and signs, as well as Roll-a-Tex, a texture additive used as surfacing in suburban buildings.

Halley is part of a generation of neo-conceptualist artists that first exhibited in New York’s East Village. This group includes Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Mayier Vaisman, and Ashley Bickerton. These artists became identified on a wider scale with the labels neo-geo and neo-conceptualism, an art practice deriving from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the commodification of art and its relation to gender, race, and class, neo-conceptualists question art and art institutions with irony and pastiche.

Halley's works were included in the Sao Paolo Biennale, the Whitney Biennale and the 54th Venice Biennale and represented in such museums and art institutions as the CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, The Tate Modern, London, the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio.

Halley lives and works in New York City.

JONATHAN LASKER

Through strong compositional structure and intelligent color choices, Lasker's paintings hum with energy. The artist explores the gap between marks and signs; a mark refers primarily to itself, while a sign signals a referent external to the painting, something known and recognizable. Though Lasker invented his own visual vocabulary, creating meaning through context and repetition, any obvious message remains elusive.

DONALD BAECHLER

Acknowledged as a second-generation pop artist, Donald Baechler was a key figure of the neo-expressionist movement. His canvases often operate like memory boards, implementing materials and fabrics collected during his travels.

SHERRIE LEVINE

The unbridled beauty of nature, along with the various cultures he encounters through his travels are pertinent to Arne Quinze’s undertaking as an artist. At its very core, his work is a reflection on these themes intertwined with a persistent end goal of reinvigorating our often-monotonous urban environments. From drawings to paintings to massive public installations imbued with bold flashes of color, his message is unequivocally optimistic.

JOHNSON EZIEFULA

Johnson Eziefula paints an expressionistic wonder. Each painting is a unique and captivating portrayal of thehumanexperience, withitshiddenautobiographical narratives borne out of memories, expertly rendered through Charcoal; black porcelain-like skin tones, imbuing the hazy textured paintings with a sense of personal history and identity. Through his art, Johnson Eziefula has created a space to process and express his feelings, using color, drama and symbolisms to add emotional weight to the works, resulting in a compelling and moving body of work.

VICTOR EHIKHAMENOR

Ehikhamenor was born and raised in Uwessan in Edo state in Nigeria, steeped in the visual traditions of the Benin Kingdom. These traditions include the practice of regularly re-painting the interior walls of buildings with fields of colour and iconography, and the creation of shrines that hold sacred artworks, especially the bronze sculptures for which the region is known. The Benin Bronzes, as they are known, have become a political lightning rod for the conversation around the looting of Africa that forms the base collection of many Western museums’ collections. These histories and traditions are ever-present in Ehikhamenor’s work, offering a searing criticism of colonialism while celebrating the dynamic and complex realities of present-day Nigeria.

KWESI BOTCHWAY

With his distinct angular brushtrokes, Kwesi Botchway (b. 1994, Accra, Ghana) emphasises black skin with purple hues, a colour linked to royalty, grandeur, mystery, magic, seduction, and wisdom, wherein he highlights the idea of beauty in relation to the Black experience. He positions himself within the Black Art tradition, using his work to address anti- Blackness experienced both in Africa and across the global African diaspora. His art aims to transcend dominant narratives, celebrating the loveliness, vitality, and expansiveness of Blackness. Botchway’s work reinterprets the portrait tradition of western art by centering the long-overlooked Black figure.

ESIRI ERHERIENE-ESSI

Esiri Erheriene-Essi (b. 1982) is an Amsterdam-based artist, originally born in London to Nigerian parents. Inspired by artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Lucian Freud, Alice Neel and Jean-Michel Basquiat, she creates colorful mid to large-scale figurative paintings portraying family and friends in everyday situations, incorporating familial and historical backgrounds as well as personal experiences.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS

"Most African Americanshavetroubletracingtheir roots beyond a generation into slavery. I have been asked in the past "where are you from" on several occasions by people who seem bewildered and disappointed when I say "New York, Philadelphia before that, and Virginia before that". I conceived of 'A place to call home (Africa-America)' because I wanted to create a place which African Americans could be "from". Most of us have never been to Africa and have never felt totally at home in the U.S.. Nevertheless, both places are clear that both of these places have deep resonance in how we define ourselves or are understood by others in our increasingly hyphenated society. The piece also considers the way African Americans arrived in the Americas via forced migration is as easily overlooked as the way these two continents put together conflate and distort reality at first glance."

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS

American artist Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections of the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic.

EMMANUEL TAKU

In capturing the layered essence of the black bodies in my work, I seek to capture a sense of balance and conflict within a single entity captured as a demi- god. I have always looked to push the boundaries of representation and I believe it is important to celebrate the complexity of existence that black people turn to internalize.