« Ceux qui arrivent à entrer un court instant dans la vie des autres peuvent avoir plus d’importance que ceux qui y sont installés depuis des années. » Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Rosa Candida, 2007)
I will always be glad to have accepted the invitation from the group Jeune Peinture Belge to visit the studio of artist Tina Gillen in 2022. It was an afternoon in September that offered a soft, almost cozy light in the sky. I had heard to Gillen’s work as she was the featured artist of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale that year but had not yet seen any of her work with my own two eyes.
Tina Gillen is a woman artist of a unique presence. She shines with the delicate balance of a soft-spoken person who is at once determined and sharply curious about the world around her. She made our group feel welcome in her artist’s habitat, prepared a teapot of fresh lemongrass tea and butter cookies, and let our imagination run free as she led us through her myriad sketchbooks and canvases in the room.
My observations rather quickly led me to conclude that experimenting with painting as a medium is essential to Tina Gillen. Indeed, she is a talented colorist whose pictorial compositions showed both a mastery of the medium yet also a quest for newness. I also noticed her fascination for architectural spaces and cinematic scenes. Many paintings by Tina Gillen will either convey the desire to build a space within a space or the desire to show scenes that seamlessly occur one after the other like in a movie.
Out of these moments of pure enjoyment followed another one: when Tina Gillen sat us in front of a discreet projection screen to show photographs of her latest travels in Venice. Exactly a year ago, Tina explained, she had joined forces with curator Christophe Gallois to select a group of students that would form the group Forms of Life. As a project funded by both the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and Mudam Luxembourg, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc, the participants would have to be students pursuing a master’s at the former institution and represented by the latter through Gallois in his role as head of exhibitions. Over the course of one year and starting in October 2021, the selected seventeen student artists attended a monthly seminar each time featuring a different international thinker. Invitees included anthropologist Tim Ingold, photographer Katinka Bock, filmmaker Ismaïl Bahri, and artist Delphine Wibaux. Such encounters became for participating students a time for exchange and reflection on various disciplines as well as on their own artistic practices. This series culminated with a one-week workshop in Venice where they had the chance to experience the city and its lagoon as a context for artistic experimentation.
We were mesmerized by this tale and expressed our admiration for Tina’s ongoing efforts in this project. The second year of Forms of Life, she went on to conclude, would be dedicated to the elaboration of a group exhibition featuring those fortunate artists. Without much reflection from my end, I gave in to my heart’s desire and approached Tina to say that I would like to participate with Forms of Life. Not only had I had lived many years in Venice and therefore felt that I could relate to their experience but also, quite simply, I liked the project’s essence and wanted to discover the work of young artists in evolution. Tina thanked me and we convened that she would introduce me to Christophe during his next visit in Brussels. Shortly thereafter, Tina kept her promise and after a successful three-person meeting, I was officially part of Forms of Life as curator.
I wholeheartedly enjoyed getting to know the artistic practices of Max Beets, Pieter Eliëns, Kristí Fekete, Rafaela Figurski Vieira, Nina Gross, Malena Guerrieri, Paul Müller, Oona Oikkonen, Laurence Petrone, Pit Riewer, Maren Katharina Rommerskirchen, Alexandra Vitalyevna Samarova, Maria Sawizki, Rune Tuerlinckx, and Witold Vandenbroeck. Tina, Christophe and I would regularly meet with them at the Royal Academy of Arts Antwerp and engage in lively discussions on the progress in their work as well as on the general state of the world. In quite a special way, I would say, the group became its very own form of life. As curator, I highly benefitted from Tina’s artistic sensibility, Christophe’s professional experience, and the artists’ creative input. Our discussions were plentiful and always revolved around three central questions: In what ways do we inhabit the world around us? What is our relation to other forms of life? And how does one define a form of life in the context of visual arts?
One often hears that time goes fast, and so it did for me. One by one, like molting caterpillars, the Forms of Life artists opened their wings as butterflies. They were ready. The homonymous exhibition opened its doors at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp on October 20, 2023 and stayed on view until November 9th of that same year. It was a successful event that regularly welcomed new visitors and made the participating artists feel very proud. Indeed, as two full years had gone by since the start of Forms of Life, they had all completed their master’s studies and therefore could stand to appreciate an exhibition with works featured by them no longer as students but as young art professionals.
I also felt very proud for having had the privilege to witness and support the intellectual development of a group of talented artists during the course of an entire year.
