Image: De Brock Gallery, Knokke-Heist
De Brock in Knokke will open 'Shape of Color' on 1 August 2026, a group exhibition focused on abstraction and the ways color can operate as structure rather than decoration. The show is presented by the gallery as a study of four distinct approaches to painting and composition, bringing together work by Bernard Frize, Imi Knoebel, Robert Mangold and Landon Metz. According to the gallery’s exhibition text, the project traces how color can define space, determine form and shape a work’s visual experience.
The exhibition runs at Zeedijk 758 in Knokke, Belgium, from 1 to 30 August 2026. An opening reception is scheduled for Saturday, 8 August, from 5 to 8 pm. De Brock’s website and preview material both list the same date range and venue, while the gallery identifies the presentation as part of its ongoing focus on post-war and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on abstract painting.
'Shape of Color' is organized around a generational and formal dialogue among artists whose practices have long been associated with abstraction. De Brock’s text presents Kenneth Noland as part of the exhibition on the gallery website, where he is described as having transformed the canvas into a field of circles, chevrons and stripes, and as having established color as a primary vehicle of spatial experience. The same exhibition page also includes Robert Mangold, whose shaped canvases and geometric structures are said to have expanded painting’s formal vocabulary. The preview page for the show, however, lists four artists rather than five, naming Frize, Knoebel, Mangold and Metz.
The gallery’s accompanying notes describe Imi Knoebel’s practice as one in which color is inseparable from the object itself, with rigorously composed works that blur the boundary between painting and sculpture through geometry and material. Knoebel’s artist page on De Brock’s site emphasizes his long engagement with relationships among color, structure, form and material, and notes major institutional solo exhibitions at venues including Dia:Beacon in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. De Brock previously staged a solo Knoebel exhibition in 2024 and included him in the 2024 group show 'Cook, Knoebel, Metz'.
Bernard Frize is presented in the exhibition text as taking a process-based approach in which gesture and chance coexist. De Brock describes his luminous, interwoven brushstrokes as producing surfaces where color emerges through method rather than expression. The artist’s page adds that Frize often works in series, following strict rules of process and palette, and that he has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Paris, Akademie der Künste Berlin and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. De Brock also featured Frize in a solo exhibition in Knokke in 2018.
Landon Metz represents the younger end of the exhibition’s span. The gallery describes his work as moving through fluid, biomorphic forms that hover between figure and ground, with restrained compositions built on rhythm, repetition and chromatic quiet. Metz’s artist page on De Brock’s website places him in a lineage of Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, and notes recent solo exhibitions in London, Dubai, Seoul and New York. De Brock previously mounted his solo exhibition 'Come Together' in 2022 and included him in 'Cook, Knoebel, Metz' in 2024.
The exhibition text frames 'Shape of Color' as a dialogue across six decades of abstract painting rather than a linear history. It argues that the works in the show reject illusion in favor of presence, asking viewers to engage directly with scale, rhythm, proportion and chromatic relationships. The gallery says the exhibition will be on view through 30 August 2026.
