Michel Frère

Michel Frère was born in 1961 in Brussels, and died in 1999 in Morlanwelz, Belgium

This is one of the reasons the paintings are so thick. They are an unending accumulation of errors and disillusionments.

Michel Frère

Michel Frère is a Belgian painter who had a meteoric career of 15 years that began in the mid-1980s and ended with his premature death at age 38 in 1999. At the outset he produced figurative works emblematic of the 1980s in Europe and the US. Soon he started to explore the material potential of painting by layering oil paint into animated sedimentation that combined seduction and abjection. He chose to frame them behind glass, creating a distance between the viewer and the work while integrating the viewer’s gaze and what surrounds it through reflection. He was widely exhibited by major galleries in Europe and the US where he spent the last part of his short life. He was free, both rebellious and loyal, addicted to risk-taking and entirely dedicated to pushing painting into unexplored territories.

The exhibition at KIN brings together emblematic large-scale paintings, along with a sculpture, a number of smaller works, and archival material from his studio, offering a fuller sense of both Frère’s practice and the period his work and life embody. The exhibition is a first attempt at a new reading of that work, based not only on its formal singularity but on the questions it carries, from informal art to queer culture.

The exhibition is curated by Anne Pontégnie.

Liste Art Fair Basel 2026

On the occasion of LISTE, KIN is pleased to present a solo booth of work by Dan Vogt. The presentation brings together a group of statues alongside a series of reconfigured, elongated books. The works reflect on how the major ideological transformations that occurred in the postwar period were renovations established in public consciousness by apparatuses of the image.

Since 1913, the readymade has been the topic of wide-ranging fascination. Early on it was rejected by critics who claimed that arbitrary objects becoming works of art would erode the boundary between art and everyday life. But today, the landscape is much changed. A century on, the image is our sordid sovereign and what instruments we have agree that art operates in response to image and not the other way around. One wonders whether the critics of the day might have foreseen a world where the crisis would be so judiciously set in motion by friendly fire.

kinship II

kinship II marks the second group exhibition at KIN, following its founding and inaugural program three years ago. Bringing together emerging and established artistic positions, the exhibition presents a vibrant selection of recent works. Much is set in motion: unexpected correspondences, subtle frictions, and a dynamic field of relations unfolding across the space.

Abbas Akhavan, Danai Anesiadou, Michael Beutler, Manon de Boer, Andrea Büttner, Yvo Cho, Magdalena Frauenberg, Mekhitar Garabedian, Eva Giolo, Zuza Golińska, Liam Gillick, Dorota Jurczak, Aglaia Konrad, Natasja Mabesoone, Sam Marshall Lockyer, Suzanne Lafont, Barbara & Michael Leisgen, Marcin Maciejowski, Hana Miletić, Shaun Motsi, Christa Näher, Michelle Rawlings, Fabrice Schneider, Leander Schönweger, Andrzej Steinbach, Michael Van den Abeele, Dan Vogt, Angharad Williams, Jan Wolski, Anna Zacharoff, Philip A. Zimmermann, Thomas Zipp.

Recognitions
Ryan Cullen

“‘That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.’”

In 1955 the novel The Recognitions by William Gaddis appeared. At its centre stands a painter, Wyatt Gwyon, who produces technically perfect paintings in the style of the Flemish Old Masters. His works circulate successfully on the art market: collectors buy them, dealers sell them, experts admire them. And yet they are considered forgeries. Not because the painting itself is bad, but because the name underneath is wrong. Gaddis describes here a fundamental shift.

LA MERVEILLE DE LA VIE:
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys

In the winter of 2009, the decision was made to create 500 pencil drawings, following the principle of “warsprong.” These drawings sketch a picture of life on Earth. In 2010, the drawings were exhibited in Basel and subsequently in Vienna in the year 2014. After this, the drawings were stored in cardboard boxes for preservation in a state archive. The collection was recently rediscovered during work in the archive. For the exhibition La Merveille de la Vie, a selection of some 140 drawings was made, offering a glimpse into the most striking features of life on Earth.

Truth or Consequences: Dan Vogt

“A WWII soldier with outdated garb: the go-to depiction of the Army Man, a stock character pulled out when representation of the military is needed. Likewise, the nuclear family – itself a product of post war mentality – is by now something of a stock character as well, used to represent the familial ideal. I imagine this character-soldier and how they exist when they are not in the spotlight performing on stage. I think about how the terms responsibility, discipline, authority, games etc. are synonymous to both military and family frameworks, and in the case of these anachronistic representations, how they would function as one structure.”

Art Cologne 2025

At Art Cologne, KIN presented a group presentation of the gallery’s programme. Featuring works by Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Shaun Motsi, Andrzej Steinbach and Angharad Williams.

Barrage
Yalda Afsah

For more than a century, the town of Ploral, in the southwestern Spanish region of extremadura has celebrated the idiosyncratic Jarramplas festival. Its protagonist is the costumed “el Jarrampla”, whose name derives from the Spanish word “arramplar”, meaning to steal. Legend has it that he was a man who came to the town to steal the ranchers’ animals. But he underestimated the ferocity of the locals who bombarded him with turnips until he fled. Every year in January, the townspeople re-enact the event, with one male citizen in costume with carbon fibre armour underneath) playing the Jarramplas and hundreds of others pelting him with turnips. German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah’s Jarramplas observes the annual event and its performance as well as the social context it is informed by, subtly building tension as teenagers gather in the streets, tractors deliver tones of turnips and crowds form until the fight begins.

Spectacles
Shaun Motsi

In Spectacles, the artist brings together a new body of work that extends his thinking across cut-outs, drawings, sculptures and videos. The exhibition title holds a double meaning. On the one hand, the word refers to the charged appearance of something extraordinary like a staged event or an image that seizes the gaze. But on the other hand, spectacles frame, distort, and direct vision, functioning as optical tools.

Basel Social Club 2025

At Basel Social Club, KIN presented works by Ryan Cullen. Cullen’s series of still life paintings of plastic water bottles are meditations on the labor of painting. In his recent exhibition Protestantism in Painting, curated by Nelson Beer, the artist reflected on the endless reflections of the medium of painting through the sociological lens of “work” and its relationship to protestantism. In his bottle works, the artist renders light refracted through various brands of bottled water. Light bounces off the plastic medium and creates vibrant refraction. This interplay emphasises how perception, materiality, and light converge in painting, drawing attention to the subtle, layered processes that shape visual experience.

Liste Art Fair Basel 2025

At Liste, KIN presented seven paintings by Shaun Motsi. At first encounter, these oils on linen resemble hazelnut Ritter Sport chocolate bars, sensi- tively rendered in various states of shelf life: broken up, cracked, some pristine. Closer engagement with the glistering surfaces of the paintings reveals a deft use of loose brushwork to create their delectable textures and mounds and suddenly the motif dissolves into a layered mass of casual mark-making. There is a deceptiveness in the apparent simplicity of these works, hiding in plain sight the fact that they are the distillation of a multitude of references and metaphors. Art historically they deal in the Renaissance techniques of brunaille underpainting and trompe l’œil. Conceptually they borrow from the anti-colonial phi- losophy of Édouard Glissant and his clarion call for ‘the right to opacity for everyone.’ As Glissant stated ‘I no longer have to ‘understand’ the other, that is, to reduce him to the model of my own transparency, in order to live with this other or to build something with him…’

Conversation: Simon Denny

Nicolaus Schafhausen and Simon Denny were in conversation discussing the differences between the art world today and the one they met in almost 20 years ago. This conversation took place ahead of Denny’s upcoming solo exhibition at KIN that will present an installation that Nicolaus Schafhausen first encountered in 2006 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. The installation, Less stale attachment, marks an early moment in Denny’s practice characterised by a material-based approach that has since developed into the distinctive aesthetic that Denny has honed over the last two decades – merging technology, politics, and systems of power. The conversation pulled apart the similarities and differences in approach, and how changes over time and over cultural context have a profound impact on the direction of creative work. In a moment of increasing nationalism, the artist and gallerist reflected on their relationship to working across borders and methodologies.

Less stale attachment
Simon Denny

Simon Denny’s installation Less stale attachment was first exhibited in 2006 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. The installation was shown as part of a group exhibition called Break: Construct that invited nine emerging artists in the region to exhibit work around the ideas of experiential and environmental totality. Drawing inspiration from the collaged environments of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters alongside Frederick Kiesler’s Galaxies, the exhibition examined how materials and their contexts are shaped by their quotidian environments. At KIN, the exhibition is presented as a near-exact restaging of the 2006 installation at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Taking it back to its original form, scale, and sensibility, Denny reflects on the enduring questions that first emerged in his practice.

Art Brussels 2025

Presentation of Michael Van den Abeele & Laurent Dupont in collaboration with Gauli Zitter.

“Both artists recruit a new kind of headlessness. At first Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Martin Kippenberger’s pallets, packaging multiples, and oatmeal-and-paint coated Ford Capri might come to mind, but the mood here is humble, there is a lack of showmanship, outsourcing, deadpan, or aggression, and rather a willing submission to limitations. The work is quieter, more amateur and industrious than that of artists like Michael Krebber or Lutz Bacher. With programmatic, almost obsessive, practices, Dupont and van den Abeele emphasize the body’s current dissociation from spirit and passion, in a morally decadent age marked by extreme consumption but lacking the debauched sensuality of previous cultural declines. These Belgians seem to be interested in blood, sweat, and tears, in conjuring passion through restricted means, and a redemption perhaps acquired through this process.”

What are we in now???
Angharad Williams

Muzzle Velocity refers to the speed at which a projectile or bullet exits the barrel of a firearm or artillery. Sixty-five rounds per second is currently the fastest rate for a traditional firearm. It’s also the title of the 9-minute, 40-second 4K video featured in this exhibition. In the video, I (Angharad), along with three friends, silently fly over Brooklyn in a helicopter, heading toward a landing pad in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. In 2023 I paid for us to take a helicopter for the first time. The Blade shuttle service is accessible to anyone with some disposable money. You buy the Blade, you buy time. The footage loops: we arrive, then immediately depart. It’s almost impossible to take in New York (America) all at once.

Urlaub: Luca Lo Pinto

Evoking a wonderful title by Isa Genzken, the next 1 Day Project: Urlaub will be a free conversation between Luca Lo Pinto and Nicolaus Schafhausen about exhibition making, working with artists, museums, galleries, free will, dogs and aesthetic pleasure on March 15, 2025 at 7 pm.

Years
Richard Sides

In Years, Richard Sides makes use of the notion of technics popularised in 1994 by Bernard Stiegler. In Stiegler’s view, the technical object is made in-between nature and human intention. It exists as an access point to a temporality that dissolves the distinction between subject and object, between the human and the technical. It is through this logic that Sides arrives at images of cave drawings, quantum computers, and extraterrestrial life. These are connected as the necessary tools needed to operate back and forth across time – not so much in body but in mind. The paintings, on the other hand, develop through a process of accumulating past compositions and previous artworks, and eventually overpainting them with layers of a monochromatic colour.

Conversation: Angharad Williams

On the occasion of the group exhibition 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱, we hosted a conversation with Angharad Williams on Saturday, December 14 at 7 pm. The artist was in conversation with Micaela Dixon. Williams is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin working across sculpture, painting, installation, performance and writing. Her practice explores themes of authority, speech, and class while engaging with the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

kinship

kinship brings together the diverse works of 30 artists under the leitmotif of the gallery’s founding principle. Through a variety of media, the exhibition delves into kinship as a fluid, contingent structure that reframes social bonds and offers nuanced reflection on affiliation in contemporary society. The exhibition is a tribute to friendship and connection made manifest across our work and our relations. This question of connection, of how we find, make, and remake our relations with others, is explored across a variety of mediums that touch on far-ranging themes, from the generation of empathy to the origins of intimacy and theorizations on the beginning of time. Sometimes this emerges through domestic motifs or in the adaptation of spatial registers that belong to the urban landscape.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Andrzej Steinbach

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) exhibits Andrzej Steinbach’s latest series Extensions (Erweiterungen), aimed at exploring the intricate terrain where technology and representation of the human form intersect. The exhibition title borrows from a core system in robotics, where understanding and mapping the surroundings whilst simultaneously keeping track of its own location is necessary in order to navigate effectively. This concept matches Steinbach’s approach — a continual re-mapping and exploration, compelling us to question how images are constructed, deconstructed, and reimagined today.

Locally Hated
Tanea Hynes

The departure point of Tanea Hynes’ work is the awareness of the complex socio-political reality of living within the extractive economy. Hynes grew up in Labrador City, Canada, a town that was founded in the 1960s to accommodate employees of the iron ore mine, which remains the primary industry in the town to this day. Hynes’ work reveals the mundaneness, darkness, and difficulty of place. The city’s inhabitants have a complex relationship to the mine, whose presence looms large in the landscape. Her work explores this relationship and the social reality it reflects, including the complicated interconnections between the city, residents, and this industry.

and amputate myself from every function
Michael Van den Abeele

Emancipating function from form is a recurring motif in Michael Van den Abeele’s artistic practice. Often, he begins with a material or motif so wedded to its economic value that their separation comes with tricky conditions. The flat iron is tired of working, the jeans take leave from the domain of workwear and turn to ornament. In a single motion, Van den Abeele unlatches the commodity from the throes of its market and ushers it into a new arena where eros, excess, and mythology prevail. Here, the possibility of a given thing renews itself in desire, decadence and a romance for discernible things.

Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures
Liam Gillick

KIN is delighted to present Liam Gillick’s new exhibition: Fact Structures ~~Amount Structures Language Structures~~, opening on March 1st 2024. For this new body of works, exhibited in three different cities, Gillick rethinks what fundamental forms of advanced production might be, and finds inspiration in Marie and Otto Neurath’s Isotype system – illustrated by Gerd Antz – named Fact Pictures, Amount Pictures, Language Pictures; as well as Yuk Hui’s philosophical writing on techno-diversity.

Deep Listening Richard Sides

KIN’s fourth 1 Day Project presented a situation by Richard Sides on February 16, 2024 from 6 pm.

Deep Listening is a situation that engages with the architecture of KIN by activating the gallery’s interior walls as a loudspeaker. Transducers are installed on the outside of the walls turning them into a conduit; a resonant body that hosts an extended multichannel sound-work. The source audio materials are edited from an archive generated by the artist over the past 20 years. Inside, a grid is constructed of tensioned string with an accompanying wall text.

I never work with a zoom, I work with a fixed focal length and I never crop my pictures. I usually know how the image will be even before I take the picture. My eyes and feelings take the pictures, not the camera ( I know the camera by heart and can use it blindly yet I have no idea how to use other devices). The pictures are created just like that, and when it's close to the subject, it means that I am close. Why the extreme close-up view? Because over time I was no longer interested in having the context around the subject. This way, I can combine new, somewhat more abstract, also subjective context for images that are otherwise contextless. I found that it was more complicated to create clear compositions when you could see the surrounding. I find it exciting to make abstract pictures from 'real' motifs. Portraits are different and are more difficult. By defintion they are not abstract, but sometimes you have to make a head to find out what it should be.

Intervall
Thibaut Henz

Everything that Thibaut Henz photographs bears witness to physicality or to physical closeness, to a connection to things, society and its physiology. Regardless of whether he photographs the human body, animals, plants, spaces, or objects, Henz approaches his motifs in an exploratory movement — not in a reserved way but instead aggressively, observing the subject close up, in extreme cases, even as far as body orifices.
Rather than fulfilling a representational function, Henz’s photographs, often dyptichs, tryptichs or large scale compositions, illustrate the present as a contingency, reflected in coexisting realities, challenging the viewers to consider their own biases and referential contexts, through fantasised violence.

Swarm
Zuza Golińska

Swarm exhibited at KIN continues on the path set by Golińska in her previous works. The sculptures have a strong material presence that result from Golińska’s involvement in producing them within the boundaries of her workshop in the Gdańsk Shipyard. She moves through the metal workshops, scavenging through heaps of scrap metal, selecting, arranging and testing the forms in space. Cooperating with the welders, who used to approach her with disbelief and now are familiar with her presence, she binds and scrapes metal together into sculptures. Or, if the scraps allow it, she bends them into the desired forms. Finally, the rusty metal is partially powder painted in bright colours adding futuristic and painterly dimensions to the final form of the works.

In my practice,I outline the seemingly binary relationship between modernism and contemporary romanticism, between discipline and magical thinking. I explore the impact of space and architecture at the human level. I analyse the relationship between an organised structure and the body. The public sphere and the private sphere. Through my projects, I try to build new and less hierarchical relationships, between people and their environment.

Film Screening: Yalda Afsah, CURRO (2023)

For our next 1 Day Project, KIN will present CURRO, by Yalda Afsah, on the 23rd of October, at 6pm.
The 32mins film explores the ritualized taming of wild horses according to the Galician custom Rapas das Bestas, questioning the social construction of masculinity, dependence and alienation from nature through the act of “taming” in interspecies relationships.

The Desert Turned to Glass
Charles Stankievech

The Desert Turned to Glass is a meditation oscillating between the cosmic and the chthonic. Traveling through vast distances in space and time from outer space to Paleolithic caves, Stankievech entwins science fiction speculation and contemporary theories on the origin of life, consciousness, and art. A meteorite sculpture floats above a sand floor, a psychedelic video crystallizes deep time. Fog, clouds, and smoke venting from volcanic lava flows spill across the screen. At a moment obsessed with planetary endings, the visual dynamism and resonating sound of air recapitulates not only the invention of the concept of atmosphere in the history of meteorology, but also the formation of the earth’s atmosphere in geologic time—in a word, to creation itself. The Desert Turned to Glass calls forth otherworldly experience from within the depths and heights of this world, at the same time cultivating an aesthetic disposition to receive them.

A fieldwork engages with the geographic site but then warps one’s perception of the space comparable to a mathematical “strange attractor.” Sharing, on the one hand, the history of art installation and on the other hand, the history of “site-specific” or earthwork art, a fieldwork creates its own temporary architecture within a space or in a landscape. However, such a landscape need not be natural and the architecture may not always be a traditional shelter or sculpture, but can be composed of sonic material, electromagnetic fields, light fluctuations, or relationships. At its core, a fieldwork is dynamic and geospatial.

Reading & Screening: Michael Van den Abeele, Jeans & Pasta

KIN’s second 1 Day Project will present a new live reading & video screening by Michael Van den Abeele, Pasta, alongside a selection of works from the ongoing Jeans/Denim series.

Pasta -currently a working title -is a religious comedy. I’m writing it as a monologue in which the ‘Who will come’, and the ‘What’s for’ dinner can get confused, and the topics on the table are Payment in Psychoanalysis, Inflation of Soul, closet-Calvinism and Cupids, among other issues.

John C. Welchman’s Royal Book Lodge

KIN and HISK are delighted to be co-hosting a book launch on September 20th at 6 pm of John C. Welchman’s Royal Book Lodge published by Hatje Cantz. Welchman will present on the art, actions, exhibitions and books of the para-collaborative Royal Book Lodge. John C. Welchman, author of Royal Book Lodge (Hatje Cantz, 2023), introduces the history and achievements of this nimble and richly innovative international network of artists formed in the late 1980s in Berlin, Paris and Marseille, spearheaded by Juli Susin and Véronique Bourgoin.

bratki
Dorota Jurczak

For years, Dorota Jurczak has been creating an immensely analogue body of work devoid of digital characteristics. An output that is defined by a deep appreciation for texture, colour and the qualities of physical material. Combined with a fearless approach to expenses, this results in most immersive and tactile works of art. Jurczak’s understanding and consequent interpretation of crafted history has become the signature of her style, evoking a sense of timelessness and permanence. All executed with a confident scratch and little to no admission of a modern world.

Schatten personaze
gehen außenrum
schmieren ihre wizage
spielen dumm
bizarre bandage
was kann mann machen?
schon lange schantage
einfach lachen

MICRO
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys

At the end of the 1970s, we watched Micro Macro on Belgian television every day. In this game show, a number of candidates were shown an extreme close-up of an object. While the image zoomed out very slowly, they had to guess which item it was. Whoever recognized it first won the corresponding object. Usually, it was a trivial thing like an ashtray, a padlock, a bucket or a mixer.