• Opening times

  15/12/2021 - 12/06/2022: * monday: closed * tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday: from 10:00 to 17:00 * saturday and sunday: from 11:00 to 18:00

• Price

  Article 27: 1,25 €

This temporary exhibition, accessible with a ticket to the Fin-de-Siècle Museum, presents the drawings, photographs and certain paintings that the Belgian artist Henri Evenepoel (Nice, 1872- Paris, 1899) produced during his Algerian period. Despite it being a difficult time in his life, the drawings and paintings made during this period are considered to be among the best of his work. Some fifty known sketches and watercolours show that here, too, it is mainly the human figure that fascinates him. This relatively small number can be explained on the one hand by the fact that Algerians did not want to be portrayed, and on the other by the frequent use of his photo camera, with which he took more than 400 pictures in the four months he spent on the African continent. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium hold sixteen paintings, over thirty drawings, a sketchbook and some prints, the collection was also completed in 1970 by hundreds of letters from the artist to his father, as well as 877 negatives of his photographs. On the occasion of this temporary exhibition, a selection of these photographs is now printed in its original state. This has been made possible thanks to the digitisation of the negatives which was carried out by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, within the framework of the DIGIT PROGRAMME for the digitisation of the scientific and cultural heritage of the FSI and the Royal Belgian Film Archive (Cinematek), financed by the Federal Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO).

• Opening times

  10/02/2022 - 30/07/2023: * monday: closed * tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday: from 10:00 to 17:00 * saturday and sunday: from 11:00 to 18:00

• Price

  Normal: 10,00 € - Article 27: 1,25 €

Two exhibition rooms contextualise two burning topics for museums around the world: by shedding scientific light on the questions of colonialism and diversity, on the one hand, and the problem of the restitution of cultural goods looted during the Second World War, on the other, the Royal Museums aims to be a laboratory for reflection that will enable us to participate in the construction of the museum of tomorrow, by insisting on how scientific research, one of the museum's primordial missions, can contribute to the contemporary debate. LOOTED ARTWORKS: HOW TO PROCEED WITH THE RESTITUTION OF CULTURAL GOODS LOOTED DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR? The issue of restitution is not new and is in fact broader than the most prominent case, that of the lootings committed during the Second World War and during the Third Reich. The Old Masters and Modern painters brought together in one room bear witness to the complexity and continuing relevance of the issue, some 76 years after the end of the Second World War. There is only one way to identify works of questionable source, and that is to investigate their provenance. Knowing in which hands a work has circulated from the time it left the studio to the present day is an essential but laborious task, which still raises many questions today. The very specific case of the painting by Lovis Corinth presented here reveals the complexity of the restitution process. Are there any international agreements on the matter? Were the lootings organised? Was the art market involved? Where do the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium stand today? These are a few of the questions that we try to answer in this thematic room. Old Masters Museum - Room 51 WHY REVISE THE TITLE OF A RUBENS MASTERPIECE? Titles of artworks are being questioned in museums around the world: the responsibility of museums to be inclusive and non-discriminatory has grown in intensification following social movements such as #metoo or #BlackLivesMatter. The Rubens work in this room, which has been renamed for the second time after 2007, is a typical example of how a title can remind the public of a painful colonial experience. The Royal Museums validate the public’s reactions and aim to commit to a policy of inclusion, based on historical facts and contexts, and thus, in that way, contribute to a scientifically based debate. Why is the title of a Rubens masterpiece today now more than ever the subject of discussion? Why was this oil sketch originally untitled and what was its function in Rubens’s studio? What were Rubens's original intentions and what place did people from Africa have in his thinking and work? These are all questions around which we would like to stimulate a constructive dialogue. Old Masters Museum - Room 60

• Opening times

  01/04/2022 - 07/08/2022: * monday: closed * tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday: from 10:00 to 17:00 * saturday and sunday: from 11:00 to 18:00

• Price

  Article 27: 1,25 €

The artist deals with themes such as chaos, destruction and dictatorship, draping his political discourse in a veil of poetry thanks to a pictorial language that is entirely his own, both fierce and delicate. Omar Ba lives and works between Dakar, Geneva, Brussels, Paris and New York. Divided between several continents, he thus develops a mindset resulting from a permanent hybridisation, far from the stereotypes attached to his African roots. This hybridity is also found in his paintings where organic touches and flamboyant colours mix, using various forms, techniques and textures (acrylic, gouache, pencil and even typex). Ba paints on a black background (on corrugated cardboard or canvas), thus asking the viewer to literally and metaphorically adapt to the darkness. Some fifteen large-format canvases, created especially for the exhibition, will be presented to the public at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. His iconography, which is both politically and socially engaged, but also imbued with personal mythology, raises historical and timeless questions, while radiating a resolutely contemporary artistic message, which can be found in artists close to surrealism and symbolism. Omar Ba denounces the chaos of the world with his brush.

• Opening times

  01/04/2022 - 07/08/2022: * monday: closed * tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday: from 10:00 to 17:00 * saturday and sunday: from 11:00 to 18:00

• Price

  Normal: 10,00 € - Article 27: 1,25 €

Her dense, complex and ambitiously scaled works evoke the rigorous exploration of abstraction and the implementation of a mathematical creative process; playing with the ambiguity created by the delicate balance between structure and chaos. Colour is a central theme in Goel's work, who refers to it as 'light, material and surface'. The artist makes her own pigments from various materials (glass, concrete, mica, graphite, leaves, etc.), most of which are taken from demolition sites in New Delhi. She thus inscribes her approach in a reflection on urban mutations, through an aesthetic that is reminiscent of the modernist experiments with which the Belgian art scene is closely associated, whether it be Joseph Albers for colour, or Agnès Martin for serialism. Control and intuition, rigour and freedom, structure and chaos meet in a creative universe that is entirely her own, and which is closely linked to the antagonisms between body and mind, science and spirituality. The selection exhibited this spring at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium bears witness to the artist's interest in colour and materiality, without forgetting the urban landscape, and includes large-scale canvases dating from 2014 to the present day, as well as a series of some twenty watercolours from the 'Botanical studies' series, which were born during the period of confinement.

• Opening times

  28/04/2022 - 07/08/2022: * monday: closed * tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday: from 10:00 to 17:00 * saturday and sunday: from 11:00 to 18:00

• Price

  Article 27: 1,25 €

Christian Dotremont (1922-1979), a prominent post-war Belgian artist and co-founder of the CoBrA movement, was one of the first to use writing to create plastic art. His 'logograms', or visual poems, emerge spontaneously from the meandering brush to produce an unprecedented form of artistic expression. The words that he impulsively lays down on paper seem to be animated by a spirit of their own and end up creating expressive compositions. Writing and painting truly merge and open a path to endless experimentations. The exhibition, showing more than 120 works on paper, photographs, films and never-exhibited-before archive documents, sheds light on the great diversity of Dotremont's logograms. Set foot in the artist's path and discover his wandering creative journey. Besides the logograms, the exhibition also includes a selection of 'word drawings' and 'four-handed works' created with artists such as Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Serge Vandercam and Hugo Claus. Artworks by Henri Michaux, René Guiette, Jean Raine, Jules Lismonde and Jacques Calonne also interact with Dotremont's oeuvre. The exhibition has benefited from exceptional loans from the King Baudouin Foundation, via the Dotremont Fund. Pierre Alechinsky also contributed to this tribute exhibition, lending the museum never-before-seen works by Dotremont from his personal collection.

• Opening times

  28/04/2022 - 07/08/2022: * monday: closed * tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday: from 10:00 to 17:00 * saturday and sunday: from 11:00 to 18:00

• Price

  Normal: 10,00 € - Article 27: 1,25 €

For the first time, we are offering an unprecedented approach to David's artwork by combining both historical and contemporary views, as well as a scientific approach by presenting to the public of the results of a research campaign that involved laboratory analyses. The exhibition is structured in three sections giving the public an new understanding of David's work. The first scientific section presents the results of the material and technical study entitled "face to face" conducted on "The death of Marat", which reveals for the first time the underlying sketch of the masterpiece. This research, carried out by the European Centre for Archaeometry of the University of Liège, is based on the use of scientific imaging techniques and non-invasive physico-chemical analyses carried out in situ. In a second, historical section, copies and ateliers variants conserved in Reims, Dijon, Paris and Versailles will be presented, as well as a version belonging to a French private collector. Finally, this section will be completed by contemporary interpretations by artists such as Thomas Houseago, Gavin Turk, Jean-Luc Moerman, or a work by Rachel Labastie, who shifts the focus from Marat to Charlotte Corday, the absent protagonist in David's representation.