adelheid de witte at barbé-urbain gallery

Vibrant and dreamy or uncanny and dissonant? The undertone of Adelheid De Witte's work lies somewhere in between. Her first solo exhibition There are Fireworks at 11pm at Barbé Urbain gallery bears witness to a surprising turn in her artistic visual language.

In the run-up to the expo, I visited her studio, a sun-drenched space in a former Catholic boys' school in the Ghent working-class district of Muide, the bustling buzz of the harbor audible in the distance. At that time, an authentic tiled floor was largely covered by a canvas. Wisely, as evidenced by the traces of oil paint and a dozen brushes lying around on the floor. The walls are full of works that clearly bear Adelheid's signature: small and large tableaux, sometimes in an atypical form, on which thin, transparent layers of oil paint have been applied…