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Valérie Mannaerts

Antennae

03.04

30.08

M Leuven

'Antennae', Valérie Mannaerts, 2025, © the artist

Valérie Mannaerts’s multifaceted oeuvre departs from intuition, materials and sensory experience. Through hybrid works, she questions the forms and properties of things and examines themes such as metamorphosis, identity and physicality, drawing on feminist theories. Her work is layered, amorphous and flexible. She explores questions such as: what is the autonomy of an object? What story can an object tell? When do the organic and the inorganic intersect? Her work resists unambiguous interpretations and predetermined norms and boundaries. It remains in a state of constant transformation and movement, balancing between representation and abstraction.

‘Untitled (eyes)’, Valérie Mannaerts, 2001 © Valérie Mannaerts

Valérie Mannaerts (b. 1974, Brussels) lives and works in Brussels. She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and the International Studio & Curatorial Programme (ISCP) in New York.

She represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and has held solo exhibitions at Marres, Maastricht (1999); the Friends of S.M.A.K. Association , Ghent (2000); De Appel, Amsterdam (2010); Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2010); and BOZAR, Brussels (2013).

Her work is included in the collections of Mu.ZEE, Ostend; FOMU, Antwerp; the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; and the Flemish Community. She has also realized numerous works in public spaces.

In the late 1990s, Mannaerts made her debut with works on paper in which she explored her own body and sexuality. She followed in the footsteps of female artists from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Eva Hesse, and developed a distinctive and adventurous visual language rooted in amorphousness. In 2003, Mannaerts represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, alongside artist Sylvie Eyberg. She subsequently expanded her artistic practice to include sculpture.

Mannaerts explores the visual language of sculpture and its boundaries, driven by a deep fascination with the notion of metamorphosis. When does an object become a sculpture? How does a sculpture relate to the pictorial plane, space and the viewer? In this context, sculpture manifests itself not as a fixed object, but as a process of constant transformation.

This focus on sculpture deepened her interest in architecture, spatiality and the relationship with the human body, leading to installations, paintings, textile works, kimonos, functional objects and projects in public spaces that engage directly with their surroundings.

Real if I want to, Valérie Mannaerts, 2014, ING Collection, © the artist, photo : Philippe De Gobert

Private Architecture (R.M.), Valérie Mannaerts, 2024, Flemish Community Collection, © the artist, photo : Filip Dujardin

Arbalette, Valérie Mannaerts, 2016, © the artist, photo : Jef Jacobs, courtesy MANIERA Gallery Brussels

Private Architecture (BeursBourse), Valérie Mannaerts, 2023 (Brussels stock exchange building), © the artist, photo : Filip Dujardin

M.M., Valérie Mannaerts, 2019, © the artist

Private Architecture (garden), Valérie Mannaerts, 2023 (Pleegzorg Vlaanderen vzw), © the artist, photo : Filip Dujardin

Tender Vessel, Valérie Mannaerts, 2024, © the artist, photo : Tom Van Hee

Private Human (detail), Valérie Mannaerts, 2017, © the artist, photo : Jef Jacobs

In ‘Antennae’, Mannaerts looks back on thirty years as an artist while also presenting new work. The title of the exhibition is telling. On the one hand, Mannaerts uses it to refer to the antennae with which insects sense their surroundings. At the same time, it functions as a metaphor for her own artistic sensitivity: a reference to the ‘antennas’ with which, as an artist, she establishes subtle and complex connections between her world, her work, the viewer and the exhibition space.

A sharp and contemporary picture of Mannaerts’s practice unfolds across five galleries. The first gallery explores the tension between painting and sculpture. In the next room, the focus shifts to the human body – a body capable of carrying and generating meaning through clothing, which is akin to a skin. The third room functions as a kind of outdoor space: a monumental woven garden that unfolds as a panorama of a personal place. In the final two rooms, the focus turns inwards, once more, to the interplay between the private and the public. The exhibition culminates in a new installation in which Mannaerts explores the position that artistic practice can occupy today.

Walther König Verlag is publishing a book in connection with Antennae.

The exhibition will then travel to the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – Le Crédac, where Valérie Mannaerts’s work will be on display from January to March 2027.

Exhibition view 'Antennae', Valérie Mannaerts, M Leuven, 2026, photo: Filip Dujardin for M Leuven

Publication: Antennae

Following 'Antennae', a publication of the same name is being released by Walther König Verlag. The exhibition serves as the backbone of this book and is reread through Mannaerts' subjective gaze. In an associative interplay of archival material and sources of inspiration, an insight into her world and artistic sensibility unfolds. Images by the artist herself and Filip Dujardin are complemented by an essay by curator Valerie Verhack.

The 224-page publication is published in English with Dutch and French translations in a separate insert, and is available for € 37 at Barbóék in M.