There is an analogy with rituals, but it’s never really clear, it’s not specified. That’s important for me in my work, to not define anything, to allow for different analogies so everybody can relate to it in a different way. Weight (2006), the second film I made of the girl turning, was based on an idea for a sculpture that would continually turn around and it would be alive. I had a whole mechanical sculpture made, but it was just ridiculous. Then I thought I have to do the same with a living girl. [The work shows what appears to be live footage of a legless girl; the top half of her body rotating slowly on a table.] That's how that came about. Most of the film works have to do with sculpture ideas, but they are experiments to me. DdAre the films like moving paintings? Behind this lies the loss of a forgotten, long set aside innocence of the painted image, the refusal of the possibility of direct observation of reality and its reproduction through painting. Today, painting can no longer merely document reality. It always entails a submersion into the long tradition of the imaginative world of painting as such. There is a dialogue in your paintings with artists such as Goya, Velázquez and Manet, for example. What is it about these artists that appeals to you?

White Cube Announces Representation of Lynne Drexler Archive By Sam Gaskin, London, 28 November 2023 Fire from the Sun” (Spotlight Series)is the 2018 book by Borremans identified in the second Balenciaga ad without children. His retrospective As sweetas it gets travelled in 2014-2015 from Bozar in Brussels to the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition Eating the Beard opened at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo before being shown at Kunstverein Stuttgart, Kunsthalle Budapest and Kunsthalle Helsinki. Michaël Borremans has also had solo exhibitions at CAC Malaga, the Hara Museum in Tokyo, MCA Denver, Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Parasol Unit in London, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven and many more.

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MB[ Laughter] They didn't know anything. But I paid them. DdIt sounds quite Lynchian [the film director David Lynch]. Belgian painter Michaël Borremans is pictured in Brussels on February 20, 2014. The inset shows signage for the Balenciaga shoe boutique in New York City. Borremans has become a talking point on social media amid a scandal over a recent Balenciaga ad campaign. BENOIT DOPPAGNE/AFP via Getty Images;/Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images MBI did once, but now I want to dress up like a policewoman. I'm looking for a nice uniform to wear to see if it will influence what I'm painting [ laughs]. DdDid being dressed as a bunny influence how you painted? Breitbart conveyed, “The now-canceled spring 2023 ad, the primary subject of which was French actress Isabelle Huppert,includeda book by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans whose paintings often depict children — including castrated children.”

The review went on: "In the most evident terms, Fire From the Sun portrays children aged two or three in various stages of play with fire and what appear to be human limbs, even hair. The children are all light-skinned Sistine-style cherubs, sometimes covered in blood. The children do not appear to be distressed or disturbed (though some viewers at the gallery may be)." The Acrobat will be accompanied by a publication including a new text by Katya Tylevich, forthcoming from David Zwirner Books. The 21st Biennale of Sydney (16 March-11 June 2018) is titled 'SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium and Engagement' and examines the state of 'superposition' by exploring how it might operate in the world today. View MoreWeight (2006), the second film I made of the girl turning, was based on an idea for a sculpture that would continually turn around and it would be alive. I had a whole mechanical sculpture made, but it was just ridiculous. Then I thought I have to do the same with a living girl. [The work shows what appears to be live footage of a legless girl; the top half of her body rotating slowly on a table.] That’s how that came about. Most of the film works have to do with sculpture ideas, but they are experiments to me. Work by the artist is held in public collections internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In another part of the review, it said, “While the fire and (possible) cannibalism suggest some kind of ritual, the works are most frightening as sketches of random violence that is both cause and effect.”“The characters shown don’t fit one stereotype (angelic) but do fit another (demonic).” Michaël Borremans, Small Museum for Brave Art (four variations) (2007). Wood, cardboard and paint, dimensions variable. Exhibition view: 21 st Biennale of Sydney, Artspace, Sydney (16 March–11 June 2018). Courtesy the artist and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. Photo: Document Photography. DdYou are exhibiting at Artspace as part of the Biennale of Sydney (BoS) from March to June. What is your approach? He continued, "As a photographer, I was only and solely requested to lit the given scene and take the shots according to my signature style. As usual, the direction of the campaign and of the shooting are not [in] the hands of the photographer."

The scenes depicted by the majority of paintings comprising Fire from the Sun show a state of being or society in which the primal is uncontrolled, without bearings, in a state of anarchy,” Bracewell writes. “ historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Michaël Borremans’ paintings present static scenes that in actual fact are an illusory reflection of the artist’s imagination. His way of grasping reality has much to do with the pictorial world of Dutch painting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though he often links his pictorial subjects with latently present violence, they stand out with the extraordinary beauty of their execution,” notes the exhibition curator and Galerie Rudolfinum director Petr Nedoma. MBI want to do an experiment there. I want to show part of my thought process in the evolution of my work. I will be showing a lot of stuff that I have in drawers and that has been significant for me. Some are old pictures I've collected from here and there, even from the internet, and I've them printed out—things that have been influential in forming my vocabulary—and a lot of drawings, unfinished drawings from my personal archive, shown in vitrines. There will also be scale models—little sculptures, ideas for sculptures. Sculpture is a hobby for me. Nobody is waiting for it and I like that. I am including a couple of film works and spaceships that I have designed. Melissa Martin, Ph.D., is a former professional child therapist, early literacy advocate, book author, and syndicated opinion-editorial columnist. Her work appears in various national and international newspapers. She lives in Southern Ohio.The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. This year at the opening of his solo exhibition, Fire from the Sun, the inaugural show at David Zwirner’s new gallery in Hong Kong, Borremans was likewise satisfied. This time, because people were less likely to voice the meaning they read into his paintings. The significance was in this reticence. The perceived meaning of the works is difficult to voice or uncomfortable to admit. Who Is Michaël Borremans? Artist's Work Resurfaces Amid Balenciaga Scandal". Newsweek. 28 November 2022 . Retrieved 2 December 2022. In this recent body of work, the artist continues to explore surface and artifice in his careful consideration of mise-en-scène. As Tylevich notes, “Art is just one object with which to fill a vitrine. Mounted butterflies another, cuts of meat or war medals other still. As metaphors, the contents of Borremans’s display cases are any or all of the above. It is the vitrine, and not the human, that is the recurring character across The Acrobat’s landscape paintings, which really aren’t landscapes, deceitful as they are, just as The Acrobat’s portraits really aren’t portraits. The vitrine has a mystical quality here. Despite the nature surrounding it, the glass remains clean of tree sap, bird droppings, and fingerprints. It is, apparently, a newcomer. Somebody offstage might care devotionally for the structure, perhaps the artist himself.” 3

David Zwirner is pleased to announce The Acrobat, an exhibition of new paintings by Michaël Borremans, taking place at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location in New York. This will be the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York since 2011. It follows his 2018 exhibition Fire from the Sun at David Zwirner Hong Kong.

Borremans’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at many prominent institutions. Most recently, Michaël Borremans: Fixture, was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015-2016. A major museum survey, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, which included one hundred works from two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. The exhibition traveled later in the year to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, followed by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2015. The previous year, Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist’s first museum solo show in Japan, was on view at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Work by the artist is held in public collections internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.