Image: Roger Raveel museum, Machelen-aan-de-Leie
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, the Roger Raveel Museum and mudel are presenting the tenth edition of the ‘Biënnale van de Schilderkunst’ across three Belgian locations from 28 June through 18 October 2026. The anniversary exhibition brings together 48 artists and examines how painting might be defined beyond the modern idea of applying paint to canvas.
The biennial is distributed between the Roger Raveel Museum in Machelen-aan-de-Leie, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle and mudel in Deinze. Rather than presenting a single exhibition in three branches, the museums have developed distinct exhibitions around a shared research question: how the boundaries of painting can be extended through forms, materials and approaches that exceed conventional pictures on a surface.
At the Roger Raveel Museum, curator Melanie Deboutte has organised nine artists’ rooms. The presentation begins with the act of looking, treating painting as a shifting interplay of language, texture, scale and spatiality. The museum describes the pictorial gesture as one element within a broader conceptual field, in which surface and architecture, presence and absence, and object and image continually change places.
The artists presented in these rooms are Richard Artschwager, Alighiero Boetti, Orla Barry, Aglaia Konrad, Katja Mater, Guy Mees, Mariella Simoni, Sietske Van Aerde and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven. Their practices include departures from drawing and writing, spatial interventions and hybrid forms. The exhibition’s selection includes Katja Mater’s ‘while i have you’ (2026), Mariella Simoni’s ‘Senza titolo’ (1992) and Artschwager’s ‘Untitled (Crate Sculpture DW-1)’ (1998), alongside works connected to the collections of the participating institutions.
The Roger Raveel Museum’s biennial presentation is also part of its reopening after a year and a half of closure for renovation. According to the museum, structural work improved climate conditions in two exhibition galleries and the depot, while the building and garden were refurbished. The museum holds a collection of more than 800 paintings, drawings and objects. Its parallel collection presentation, ‘koren nog altijd / koren’, runs from 28 June through 24 December 2026 and places selected works by Roger Raveel in thematic and associative relation rather than chronological order.
Works by Raveel, Suzanne Bomhals, Fons Roggeman, Léon Spilliaert, Louis Thevenet and Rik Wouters are included in the Roger Raveel Museum’s wider presentation of the biennial. The selection gives particular attention to earlier paintings and drawings and to the tension between figuration and abstraction, as well as between image and reality. Guided tours of the biennial at the Roger Raveel Museum are scheduled for 6 September and 4 October, while a cycling route links all three venues through the Leiestreek until 18 October.
