Image: La Boverie, Liège
La Boverie in Liège is presenting ‘Anna Zaboun – Espace Jeunes Artistes’, an exhibition focused on the Ukrainian-born painter’s imaginary gardens and their role as spaces of protection, withdrawal and projection. The exhibition opened on 20 August and remains on view through 11 October 2026. Admission is free.
Presented through La Boverie’s ‘Espace Jeunes Artistes’ programme, the exhibition is titled ‘L’invention du refuge’ (‘The Invention of Refuge’). According to the museum, Zaboun’s gardens are not straightforward depictions of nature but mental constructions in which the tensions between the outside world and the desire for protection are concentrated. The paintings recast the garden as a contemporary refuge, set against a reality perceived as unstable.
Zaboun’s work draws on the tradition of enclosed gardens, including the medieval hortus conclusus and the carefully ordered designs of classical gardens. Her compositions also borrow from French formal gardens, English gardens and tropical landscapes. Yet the spaces do not reconstruct any identifiable location. Labyrinths, pools, topiary and plant-based architecture instead form hybrid environments where geometric control meets exuberant vegetation, producing what the museum describes as a precarious balance between mastery and abandonment.
That ambivalence extends to the garden’s function. In Zaboun’s paintings, it offers protection while also suggesting isolation; it invites contemplation but can imply disorientation. The painted spaces are not presented as stable sanctuaries, but as places in which shelter and uncertainty coexist. This tension gives the garden a psychological dimension beyond its status as a conventional landscape motif.
Colour is central to the paintings’ departure from naturalism. Acid greens, deep violets, fluorescent pinks and near-unreal reds create an explicitly artificial pictorial world. Rather than imitating the appearance of a particular landscape, the works use colour to turn the garden into a space of projection, inviting viewers to construct their own narratives. The museum’s accompanying text describes the paintings as engaging memory, desire and fiction through a sensory experience that evokes water, humidity and the turns of a path that can never quite be completed.
The exhibition frames this invented landscape as a response to a wider need to create spaces of retreat in a rapidly changing world. In that account, painting becomes a means of inhabiting a reimagined environment: fragile, fictional and resistant to the instability of the real. Zaboun was born in Reni, Ukraine, in 1997, lives in Ans and works in Liège. She holds a master’s degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Liège. ‘Anna Zaboun – Espace Jeunes Artistes’ is open at La Boverie from 20 August to 11 October 2026, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with free access.
