DMW Artist – Ballroom Gallery

Kaspar DeJong

Kaspar Dejong

°1995 in Maastricht, NL, lives and works in Amsterdam

Kaspar Dejong earned his master's degree from the Sandberg Institute in 2021. After completing his BA (minor in Critical Studies) at the Willem De Kooning Academy in 2017, he exhibited his final project "Traffic Gaze" at the DSM Art Collection. His work was recently shown at Art Rotterdam, Ballroom Project Antwerp, Kunsthal Gent and was nominated for the Slijuters Prize 2021. He is currently completing a residency program in Berlin at Raum24. Kaspar Dejong's work is in the semiotic tradition of investigating and exploring signs and symbols as an important part of communication. "I tend to reuse existing images and objects from my everyday environment and deconstruct these objects and images in such a way that their signals lose their meaning and/or their authority and original function is questioned." (Dejong on his work) The themes Dejong addresses spring from a fascination with the obvious, the everyday, and with the small beauties of the world. They are processes in which the ravages of time penetrate a man-made structure or system.

Works

Dries Segers

Dries Segers

Dries Segers (°1990, Belgium)

is a photographer, fabulator, storyteller, and plant bender. He works with various media and print techniques. His work is centered on photographic fabulation with a main focus on the non-human, Invisibles, and ecological meltdown. Segers works with the history of photography by activating the use of specific techniques and attitudes. This results in plant-based prints, camera-less photographs, and extreme close-up photography. His latest project Hotel Bellevue focuses on border trees and a Celtic use of a landscape.

The work of Dries Segers has been shown in many solo and group shows, including Vitrine Gallery (Basel, Switzerland), A Tale of A Tub (Rotterdam, Netherlands), The Weekend Room (Seoul, South Korea), De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Musee and Galerie Botanique (Brussels), Neue Galerie (Ausberg, Germany), Warte für Kunst (Kassel, Germany), 019 (Ghent), Art On Paper (Bozar, Brussels), Tique art space (Antwerp), De Warande (Turnhout) and Fotomuseum (Antwerp).

Joris Vanpoucke

Joris Vanpoucke

°1983, lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium

Through various landscapes, distorted by dreamlike visions of flowers and other realistically drawn flora, Vanpoucke exhibits a world inspired by memories and existential questions, rather than by a visible reality. Like the many walks the artist takes around his studio during sunset or sunrise, Vanpoucke’s paintings appear ever to shimmer between night and day, between being awake and asleep, and between the dream and the mundane. What is real can no longer be ascertained. Surroundings become contexts and the landscape becomes the territory of the mind. Even though, in appearance, Vanpoucke’s paintings seem highly different from his drawings, they both possess a strong sense for modern-day Romanticism. Both are equally vulnerable and demonstrate the artist’s constant sensibilities; melancholic, nostalgic, utopian, and rich with a classical notion of the sublime. Made with great attention to both the art of drawing and painting, Vanpoucke’s works are simultaneously outspoken and quiet, daring to release a sigh when everything around it seems to scream. As such, Vanpoucke presents a sense of wonder not often seen in current times, finding stillness and beauty precisely where others do not, and making his works perhaps all the more welcome because of it. Vanpoucke’s works have been exhibited, among others, at Art on Paper (Bozar, Brussels), Gerhard Hofland (Amsterdam), DMW Gallery (Antwerp) and D’apostrof (Meigem).

Works

Fia Cielen

Fia Cielen

°1978, lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium

Fia Cielen makes drawings, sculptures, installations and monumental digital prints. An important recurring aspect in her work is metamorphosis. Cielen likes to introduce a natural element in the work that goes beyond her control, in an attempt to achieve a re-enchantment of a disenchanted world. The artist is particularly attracted by in-between states, transitory zones and the uncanny, which becomes evident especially in her drawings. They are populated by creatures that exist on the threshold between the human, the animal, and the elemental; beings on the verge of their next materialisation. An important source of inspiration are masks – carnival masks, old folklore and ritual masks, ritual animal disguises. Masquerade as something that is ingrained in European culture, originating from a time before the christening of Europe, a remnant of times when the wild and magical were still part of daily life. Hiding one’s face behind a mask is also a fitting metaphor for our modern culture, with its thin layer of civilization, the wildness brewing underneath. In an over-regulated world, Cielen wants to depict the states in which we can reclaim a sense of wildness, as a means of expressing an intuitive feeling that estrangement can be intrinsically more natural.

Works

Dries Segers

Dries Segers

°1990 lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Dries Segers is a photographer, fabulator, storyteller and plant bender. He works with various media and print techniques. His work is centred on photographic fabulation with a main focus on the non-human, invisibles and ecological meltdown. Segers works with the history of photography by activating the use of specific techniques and attitudes. This results in plant based prints, camera-less photographs and extreme close-up photography. His latest project Hotel Bellevue focusses on border trees and a Celtic use of a landscape.

Works

Caroline Van den Eynden

Caroline Van den Eynden

°1982 - 2022 lived and worked in Antwerp, Belgium

Caroline Van den Eynden creates sculptures and installations imbued with personal memories and crafted through meticulous dexterity. She works by hand using raw and precious materials, often combining steel, brick and glass. The formal result is similar to a model in an architectural context. It seems to meet the architectural rules, but differs at crucial points. Caroline builds a tension field that links transparency to emptiness; she creates a perfectly finished whole that is somehow still inconclusive. Her work stresses passages, evolutions and unspoken possibilities, both in the future and the past. For many, a staircase is functional; for the artist, however, it is fundamental. Without stairs, doors or passageways, one can never achieve a different or higher level.

Works

Emilie Terlinden

Emilie Terlinden

1983, lives and works in Brussels

The mystifying paintings of Emilie Terlinden, emerge through a careful selection of images from the Renaissance and objects from her everyday environment. Though the images remain recognizable to the viewer as references to a specific era, a series of careful manipulations makes them entirely the artist’s own. Before being given their fixed place on the canvas, the images are transformed by being folded, alienating them from their original form. These interventions strip the subjects of their familiar historical context and promote them to the protagonists in a new, sophisticated staged spectacle.