Join legendary artists Luc Tuymans, Carla Arocha and Kendell Geers for a backstage pass talking about why Art Matters.
For Geers, creativity itself defines our humanity — so how can art help lead us through today’s turbulent times?
Though Tuymans and Arocha have shared 25 years of marriage, their artistic paths remain strikingly individual: Tuymans is known for paintings that challenge history and memory, while Arocha explores perception and optical illusion. Together, they co-founded CASSTL, a powerhouse artist-run space in Antwerp that nurtures both emerging and established talent from around the world.
Don’t miss this inspiring conversation about love, art, and resilience and dive into why Art Matters now more than ever.
speaker
Carla Arocha has been living in Antwerp with her husband Luc Tuymans for many years now. She has been working with Stéphane Schraenen since 2005. With Schraenen, Arocha created work poised at the narrow edge of art, design and environment. Together they exhibit worldwide.
Her work is characterised by an awareness for nature and human behaviour, especially with regards to perception.
Arocha often creates her work with an intent to register what characterises our way of looking at it. With the help of light and light effects like colour, reflection and transparency, she stimulates the eyes of the spectator and investigates our way of visualising. Arocha's carefully executed installations, works with paper, as well as paintings, show a deep respect for the formal appearance of artworks, as well as a fascination for the elegance of optical effects.
speaker
Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958, Mortsel) is known for a distinctive style of painting that demonstrates images’ power to simultaneously communicate and withhold. Emerging in the 1980s, Tuymans pioneered a decidedly non-narrative approach to figurative painting, instead exploring how information can be layered and embedded within certain scenes and signifiers. Based on preexisting imagery culled from a variety of sources, his works are rendered in a muted palette that is suggestive of a blurry recollection or a fading memory. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity. They engage equally with questions of history and its representation as they do with quotidian subject matter. Tuymans’s canvases, which are typically executed on a large scale, both undermine and reinvent traditional notions of monumentality through their insistence on the ambiguity of meaning.
moderator
Kendell Geers is a pivotal figure in contemporary African art, whose powerful works explore themes of identity, resistance, and the complex legacies of history. Born in apartheid-era South Africa, Geers' journey from a working-class family to an artist in exile has profoundly shaped his unique artistic language, defying simple categorization.
Geers gained international recognition early in his career, with notable participation in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale and Documenta 11 in 2002, curated by the esteemed Okwui Enwezor. In 2013, Enwezor further cemented Geers' significance by curating his retrospective at the prestigious Haus der Kunst in Munich. Now based in Brussels, Geers continues to push artistic boundaries, creating works that resonate globally while remaining firmly rooted in his African identity and experiences.
