Sarah Smolders

Sarah Smolders' work comes into being in dialogue with a specific space and its architectural characteristics, which she carefully observes and annotates through painterly interventions and elements.

Portrait de Sarah Smolders — Sarah Smolders in her studio, Belgium, 2023 © Sarah Smolders, photo: Lien Hüwels

Sarah Smolders lives and works in Brussels.

She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, both in Ghent.

She has had solo exhibitions at LLS Paleis in Antwerp (Withdrawals, 2022), Société in Brussels (Un Signe, 2022), the White House project space in Lovenjoel (Doppelgänger, 2021), CC Merksem (On Language, 2021), Marion de Cannière gallery (Notes Of A Housepainter, 2019) and Netwerk Aalst (Concrete/Concrete, 2018). Smolders has also participated in group exhibitions at the Kunsthal Extra City (Antwerp, 2018), M HKA (Antwerp, 2019), Espace Vanderborght (Brussels, 2019), Zomertank (Leuven, 2023) and the Fred&Ferry Gallery (Antwerp, 2023).

She created a work for Vittorio Veneto in Italy in 2018 and has just finalised a public artwork for Borgerhout (Time, Set in Stone, 2023).

Sarah Smolders was an artist-in-residence at Leo XIII (Tilburg) in 2011 and a guest at Fondation CAB (Brussels) in 2019. She also worked at the Frans Masereel Centre (Kasterlee) in 2009, 2020 and 2021.

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Shifts and additions barely perceptible at first sight invite the viewer to slow down, view and experience the space in an unexpected way.

In doing so, Smolders deploys both the memory of the space and her own oeuvre. Residues of site-specific actions are brought back to the studio and then re-applied in new exhibitions, as her own spatial alphabet.

For her presentation at M, Sarah Smolders combines different residus for the first time, as part of a new spatial intervention in the exhibition spaces next to the museum’s roof terrace.