A house full of rooms shared with your family, blood relatives, or a chosen family can be a place of peace and safety, of quiet tension, or of love.



Constant Permeke explored what it means to be human and what connects people to one another. To capture psychology and human dynamics, he distorted his figures. Through the solid materiality of thick layers of paint and rubbed charcoal, or through delicate pencil lines and thinned turpentine paint, he navigated a spectrum between stubborn determination, tenderness, and spirituality. His idiosyncratic figures, with their vulnerable postures, seem to resign themselves to life. Trapped and constrained in a stifling world, they vibrate with raw, vital energy yet also breathe melancholy, surrender, understanding, and devotion.



Familial and interpersonal relationships run like a thread through Permeke’s artistic practice. His work conveys a sense of togetherness, warmth, and domestic intimacy, the longing and anticipation surrounding birth, and the raw absence and loneliness of loss. Family life was deeply important to him. Together with his wife Marietje, Permeke had six children, two of whom died at a young age.



The search for connection remains a resonant theme for artists today. Several leading artists invite critical reflection on this subject. As a “painter of the people,” Alice Neel (US, 1900–1984) was a sharp observer of human relationships and social inequality. Like Permeke, she painted people from her surroundings—family, friends, and those living at the margins of society. Her work presents an unidealized view of parenthood, often stripped of tenderness. Maria Lassnig (AT, 1919–2014) likewise portrayed unfiltered, raw scenes from daily life among couples and families, always beginning from her own bodily experience. The series of portraits by Birde Vanheerswynghels (BE, 1986) reveals the vulnerability of her own chosen family and queer community. Anne Daems (BE, 1966) observes her father and the changing vegetation in her video installation My father’s garden. For her, the garden forms a harmonious microcosm—a place where, following the slow rhythm of the seasons, she reconnects with her family in the here and now. Tom Hallet (BE, 1990) seeks to capture the cosmic bond between parent and child through the cycles of nature, where the notion of care plays a central role.



Tom Hallet explores the grey areas of his family history, shaped by trauma, where love developed in a survival strategy. His most recent work - an installation made especially for this exhibition - unfolds both in the garden and in the exhibition space. It is based on a memory: his grandmother lost her ability to speak and move later on in life. A camera, which has always been her favourite tool of communication, became her only voice during recovery. From her chair in the garden, she photographed the waking landscape at dawn almost daily. Not driven by artistic ambition, but as a way of staying in touch with her surroundings.

In many of the photos, there is a weathervane with a sun and an eclipsing moon, which Hallet’s father made for his mother. For Hallet this weathervane, an exact reproduction of which now stands in the garden of the museum, embodies the cosmic and enigmatic bond between (grand)mother and (grand)child. The sculptures in the main space of the exhibition allude to the plaited lavender nosegays that Hallet made with his grandmother every summer during his childhood. The current evoke distance and hardness, as well as unexpected fragility and tenderness. Beneath the tightly stretched skins, covered with scars and cracks, weeds and flower seeds germinate. Daily care by museum staff inevitably causes the sculpture and its scars to change, fade, and renew.

Text written by Inne Gheeraert

Participating:
Alice Neel, Maria Lassnig, Birde Vanheerswynghels, Anne Daems, Tom Hallet, Etienne Elias, Katinka Bock