Michaël Borremans valuation
Belgian painter of quiet, unsettling figures, painted with a Velázquez touch and a story that never quite arrives.
Michaël Borremans was born in Geraardsbergen, Belgium, in 1963 and lives and works in Ghent.
What a work by Michaël Borremans is worth
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Bio
Michaël Borremans was born in Geraardsbergen, Belgium, in 1963 and lives and works in Ghent. He trained at Sint-Lucas in Ghent, originally as a photographer, taking his MFA in 1996, and turned to drawing and then to painting only in the mid-1990s, in his thirties. His paintings are small to medium oils of figures doing something they do not explain — people in smocks and uniforms handling objects, figures with closed eyes, bodies bent over tables, partial or sliced figures, figurines — painted with a soft, fluent touch learned from Velázquez, Manet and Degas, in cool greys, pinks and greens. Drawings, often on old scraps of paper and peopled with tiny figures in impossible situations, are as central as the paintings, and since the 2000s he has also made short films that work like paintings that move. As Sweet as It Gets, a survey of about a hundred works, opened at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014 and travelled to Tel Aviv and Dallas.
The paintings are unique, and drawings and small oils on panel or canvas come up more often than the large canvases; the drawings are frequently on old, acidic or toned paper and are fragile. Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, which gave him his first major exhibition, and David Zwirner represent him, and a provenance through either is what a buyer expects.
Geraardsbergen, Sint-Lucas and Zeno X
His films were shown in a solo exhibition at De Appel in Amsterdam in 2007, and Eating the Beard opened at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart in 2011.
He was in Manifesta 5 in 2004, and David Zwirner showed Fire from the Sun in Hong Kong in 2018.
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