Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands
November 30, 2024–March 23, 2025
A Confrontation at the Zoo brings together nearly fifty of Michaël Borremans’s paintings from the past twenty years. The exhibition unfolds as a thematic anthology of his oeuvre, with galleries dedicated to his early works, portrayals of people, animals and objects, and series such as Fire from the Sun (2017). Among the prominent paintings on display is The Monkey (2023), which depicts a porcelain monkey in human clothes. Part of the Voorlinden collection, this painting taps into an important thematic obsession for the artist: how humans portray themselves. In this signature work, Borremans gives the weight of history, portraiture, and importance to a seemingly insignificant and disposable object, as if to say: this, too, is a human portrayal.
Michaël Borremans is an artist fluent in centuries-old technical skill, yet his works speak their own contemporary language. His oeuvre spans drawing, sculpture, film, and photography, but he is best-known for his oil-on-canvas paintings, which bristle with tension between historical medium and conceptual immediacy.
“My paintings always differ from what I had pictured. This element of chance appears in each work, and between them. What’s missing in one, appears in another. In this exhibition you can see how the paintings help each other.” —Michaël Borremans
Learn more at Museum Voorlinden.