Belgium’s art calendar is finally back from the dead, jam-packed with weekly fairs, exhibitions, and events not to be missed.
This misunderstood industry is putting its nuances on full display, but let’s not get too sentimental. Beneath the spectacle, uncomfortable questions linger.
Meanwhile, lost surrealist treasures resurface, scandals keep emerging, and the art world, as always, balances between brilliance and a hot mess.
WHAT’S NEW?
Are you sur(real)? Two previously unseen works by Belgian artist René Magritte have recently surfaced and sold in France. One — a painted wooden panel featuring a clouded sky pierced by a real pebble — sold for €255k. The second — a pencil drawing of a woman with flowing hair — went for €124k.
Both pieces had been held in the private collection of the late Belgian poet Ernst Moerman, whose 1937 film Monsieur Fantômas starring Magritte himself was first premiered at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
The two Magritte pieces
At Paris Fashion Week, the Belgian luxury brand Delvaux paid homage to its iconic Le Brillant handbag with a striking installation that intertwined art, architecture, and fashion.
The bag is inspired by the peaks of the Philips Pavilion from Expo '58, which was showcased, rising from a 3D model of its design.
The installation also featured a historic loan of three panels from Saul Steinberg's The Americans, a mural created in 1958 in Brussels, which captures the essence of American life with whimsical vignettes, blending paper cutouts, drawings, and pastels.
Saul Steingber, Downtown — Big City, from The Americans, 1958. Brussels, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Courtesy of the Saul Steinberg Foundation.
A former Sarkozy aide, Claude Guéant, is accused of taking a €500k bribe from Gaddafi and covering it with a shady art sale story. He claims to have sold two Flemish seascapes by Andries van Eertvelt, but investigators found the whole thing riddled with lies, including a forged invoice in euros from a time before the currency even existed.
SCENE & BE SEEN
It’s fair season, and they’re surfacing as fast as the tulips in Parc Tenbosch.
In the coming weeks:
Collectible Design Fair remains at the threshold between function, form, and my depleting wallet. They have extra muros events too, check out Collectible’s OFF Program.
You’ll likely spot me at Brussels Design Market, a bi-annual pilgrimage for those with a taste for the funky past.
And given the state of my bank account, I’ll also be browsing Limited Edition at Boghossian, where editioned works and objects meet a more accessible market.
There’s also Art Nouveau and Art Deco Antiques Fair in cooperation with BANAD.
Finally, Foire de Livre takes place this weekend, featuring presentations by international authors, with an after-party taking place next door at Gare Maritime.
This month, Belgium’s cultural calendar moves between reimagination and nostalgia.
Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s Romeo + Julia strips the romance from Shakespeare’s tale, casting its lovers as children caught in a cycle of society’s violence.
BOZAR’s Familiar Strangers challenges the idea of a singular Eastern European identity, tracing migration, feminism, and diaspora through over 30 works.
Prism Festival in Saint Gilles will explore the many dimensions of sound through a dynamic program of music, exhibitions, discussions, and more.
HOT TAKE
The art world has a lingering problem: Blue-chip galleries. Those gleaming institutions of exclusivity have become engines of spectacle, driven less by artistic risk than by the churn of high-value transactions.
Artists are rewarded for redundancy, refining a marketable aesthetic rather than pushing the status quo. Meanwhile, the cultural dialogue — once the heartbeat of contemporary art — fades beneath sales figures and auction results.
Beneath their glossy surface, gallery employees — the unseen labour force of this machine — navigate long hours, low pay, and, to put it lightly, emotional abuse. Interns work for the promise of exposure, and assistants burn out before they can even build a career.
The myth of prestige justifies a system where passion is exploited.
Even the artists are disposable the moment their work falls out of fashion. The industry, so obsessed with the illusion of timelessness, has built its foundation on this cycle.
Any galleries on board? If the commercial art world wants to reclaim its purpose, it must reorient itself toward longevity and livelihood rather than spectacle.
Galleries need to support artists as evolving creators, not just as brands, and they must recognize their employees as essential.
The goal should be to sustain a culture where art matters beyond its monetary value. If that shift doesn’t happen, the art world will continue to be devoid of soul.
