In 1902, Fernand Khnopff completed construction on a house on the edge of the Bois de la Cambre in Brussels. The belly of the building concealed his studio behind a brass bar that a butler would slide aside for visitors – a gesture described as pernickety and pedantic in its day. A golden circle on the floor housed the artist’s easel. Its position was adjusted in harmony with the stars. Every studio visit began in the rose garden surrounding the house, a rampart of flowers that shielded the careful choreographies of the artist’s dwelling from the bustling, gossipy city outside.

In the interbellum, Brussels lost the house. In the Freudian sixties, Khnopff was considered depraved for repeatedly painting his sister, with whom the artist shared a close and beautiful friendship. Already having fallen out of fashion in the early twentieth century with the rise of modernism, the artist again unfairly fell victim to shifting psycho-cultural codes.

A home can be more than just a dwelling. It can be attached to your back like the shell of a turtle or a pair of hidden beetle wings. It can be a trip from a garden to an inner sanctum. It can console you like the ring of your granny or the locket of your lover after unwholesome strangers have stared at you in public space. It can be the swampy back of your mind when you are required to explain your roots because of your appearance. Home started to exist when Eve showed Adam the sunset in paradise. It is not for a magazine. It’s none of anyone’s business. 

Painting a rampart of flowers is a radical gesture. So is howling at the moon. So is looking at the stars and saying no, nee, Nein, non!
This show is adjusted to the stars and artists who craft horizons – who inherited and invent survival kits and survival myths.
Khnopff staged a logic of retreat – rings within rings, intimacy in a jewel box of a home. Here, in the cloistered setting of a desacralized church, each artist, we may appreciate, finds in art itself a kind of home both protected and exposed. Artists Who Wear Jewelry gathers artists who, each in their own way, gracefully defy expectations. Artists who wear subtle jewelry in streets otherwise filled with the murmur of jeering football supporters passing by. Artists who paint ramparts of flowers. 

Curated: Kasper Bosmans

Participating: Laís Amaral, Alvaro Barrington, Paloma Bosquê, Pieter Chanterie, Jan Cox, Sonia Gomes, Tom Hallet, Fernand Khnopff,Sarah Księska, Patricia Leite, Fernando Marques Penteado, Hadassa Ngamba, Antonio Obá, Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Leticia Ramos, Jessy Razafimandimby, Luiz Roque, Quentin Sietzen, Marlene Smith, Suzanne Thienpont, Birde Vanheerswynghels, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, and Leah Ke Yi Zheng.