With A Confrontation at the Zoo the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, holds the first retrospective of this size for Michaël Borremans (*1963). Housing 41 works made over a timespan of twenty years, this is the artist’s most comprehensive solo exhibition so far. Borremans, who was first a teacher and photographer, started experimenting with painting when he was 33 and quickly gained traction in his home-country Belgium. After joining David Zwirner gallery in 2001, his work has received an increasing international interest. His oeuvre consists of drawings, films, photography, but he’s most known for his oil paintings. In 2022, the New York Times even bestowed the designation “the greatest living figurative painter” on him. However, if this recognition paved the way for a retrospective like this, it also fuels the expectations when visiting the exhibition at Museum Voorlinden.
A Confrontation at the Zoo is spread out over seven rooms, each following a theme of Borremans’ art. Even without reading the provided booklet, each room’s theme is evident and consistent and can be interpreted by the viewer. Entering the first room, only three small works (around 40 x 60 cm) are displayed on the surrounding walls. Minimalistic and simple, they keep you at a certain distance through their passiveness, lifelikeness and Verfremdung. Moving on to the next room, his subjects keep up the mood of passivity and alienation. Here Borremans’ take on repetition questions the singularity of painted works: either a series of multiple paintings or a series of objects in one painting. We see how the mundane is the subject and the medium of his oil paintings. Although his methods are reminiscent of old masters’ realism, many of his works are purposefully unfinished, drawing attention to the tactile qualities of his painting.
The portraits in the third room look like they’re avoiding our gaze. They exude an air of realistic surrealism: the figures are painted and positioned as if they were photographs, but with their faces either turned away, covered, or with a fist-filled mouth. The uncanniness of these portraits reverberates through the high white ceilings. At this point I’m already captivated by the haunting, psychological beauty of Borremans’ work that only gets more powerful with every room you enter.
As the exhibition title suggests, the museum represents the zoo and the paintings are the animals we’re confronted with. We’re looking in on this absurd reality, but are always kept at a distance. They’re taken out of context and placed in this white cube to be looked at. His characters seize you without direct confrontation. Looking at the paintings, confusion and mystery arise in us, without there being any revelation. What I am trying the capture here is a sense of the paintings as somewhat a counterpart to the viewer, but one that doesn’t reveal much, one that is uncanny and for the most part remains unfathomable. They trigger questions, and it seems that that’s precisely what Borremans wants.
In the fourth room, Borremans plays around with genre and mythological paintings. Each wall features a large oil painting. The three works from the series Fire from the Sun have the same theme: little boys, resembling Michelangelo’s cherub paintings. However, Borremans’ cherubs are little devils, with fire-red skin and blond hair, clearly staged within a yellowish scene, rebelling against order. The only other painting in this room is Apparatus, just as large, but it immediately catapults us back to sober reality, enhancing the experience through this confrontation.
Room five explores the theatrical and mechanical: people in costumes, machines made purely as a concept. Borremans uses muted colours to portray the artificial comedy of these works, contrasting the fiery red from the previous room. The Bird presents a figure in a skin-coloured suit while Large Rocket shows a person in a cone-shaped costume supple like a duvet. This ambiguity feels unsettling. The Pope, a painting in the next room, evokes the deep red colour of Velazquez’ Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Although the object is absurd, the reference is clear. Borremans makes a dialogue with the still life genre of the old masters. His versions are at once recognizable and vastly different from the traditional genre.
In the last room, eleven portraits are brought together, all staring off into the distance. While this genre is normally used for important people, Borremans is confusing us again, using unknown people and titles making us puzzled about who or what we’re looking at. All the works share an almost identical composition and format, despite having been created over a period of thirteen years and not conceived as a series. Borremans himself said it was “destabilising” to see them brought together like this. Which is a word that is applicable for A Confrontation at the Zoo, where expectations are constantly subverted.
Michaël Borremans clearly places himself within the centuries-old tradition of oil painting, by following genres and techniques of the masters before him. He takes these methods – combined with photographic knowledge and perspectives – adds surrealism with some psychological instability to this realism and, using muted colours and the mundane, brings forth a distinctive uncanniness. Although the cleanliness of Museum Voorlinden removes a bit of this uncomfortability, it still proved to be a fitting platform to convey “das Unheimliche” in Michaël Borremans’ art.
Michaël Borremans, The Ear, 2011. Oil on canvas, 42 x 53 cm, collection Stéphanie & Michel Moortgat.
Photo: Peter Cox
[Left] Michaël Borremans, The Prop II, 2015. Oil on canvas, 260 x 200 cm, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery.
[Right] Michaël Borremans, The Bird, 2019. Oil on canvas, 300 x 190 cm, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery.
Photo: Antoine van Kaam
Michaël Borremans, Fire from the Sun (Four Figurines), 2017. Oil on canvas, 174 x 220 cm, collection museum Voorlinden. Photo: Peter Cox.
Michaël Borremans, The Pope, 2020. Oil on canvas, 60,2 x 40,2 cm, Comma Foundation, Belgium. Photo: Peter Cox