Brussels – Art Spiel

September 15, 2025September 14, 2025, by Eva Zanardi

Continental Presence: Europe’s Defining Voice at The Armory Show 2025

The Armory Show 2025 – Daniel Zeller “**Inference**,” 2015, Mixed media, Approx. 95 x. , Pierogi Gallery. Photo by Eva Zanardi

September in New York is a sensory crescendo—fashion, tennis, and art converge in a city that thrives on spectacle. At the center of it all, The Armory Show 2025 returned to the Javits Center from September 4–7, hosting over 230 exhibitors from 35 countries and drawing more than 50,000 visitors. This year’s edition, the second since its acquisition by Frieze, was slightly smaller than last year’s—but no less ambitious. Dealers reported strong momentum from VIP day onward, especially for works at lower price points, while higher-priced pieces moved at a measured pace. Many noted a noticeably younger crowd—engaged, curious, and eager to discover.

November 29, 2023November 28, 2023, by Melissa Stern

Stéphane Mandelbaum at The Drawing Center

A drawing of a person

Description automatically generated — Ernst Röhm, 1981, Graphite, gouache, marker, and color pencil on paper. 54 3/4 x 47 1/4 inches

Who was Stephane Mandelbaum? A closeted gay man? The child of Holocaust survivors? A liar? A thief? A brilliant artist you’ve never heard of? All of the above and perhaps more.

The Drawing Center is presenting the first-ever show of Mandelbaum’s work in the US, and it is a show that left me gob-smacked. The combination of Mandelbaum’s brilliant drawing, deeply personal vision, and the complexity of his backstory is a tale made for cinema. Born in 1961 to a family of paternal Polish Holocaust survivors and maternal Belgian Armenians, Mandelbaum grew up in the town of Namur, about an hour and a half from Brussels. His Father, Ari, was a well-known painter, and his mother, Pili, was an illustrator. There is no record of siblings. A gifted draftsman from a young age but dyslexic and eccentric, Mandelbaum moved from Namur to Brussels, where he seemed to devote his time to making drawings and engaging in what is termed “petty crime.” He married a woman from Zaire (now called The Democratic Republic of Congo) and lived between the worlds of Belgian Africans, the Belgian crime underworld, and his own artistic imagination.

October 25, 2021October 4, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Hedwig Brouckaert: Un-Informing

PORTRAIT3 copy.jpg — Hedwig Brouckaert in her Studio in the Beginage in Ghent Belgium, August 2021

New York city based artist Hedwig Brouckaert is currently working on a body of work for two solo shows, one at the Emory & Henry College in Virginia, where she is invited as visiting artist in January 2022, and one for Galerie El in September in Belgium. She has been developing Peel (America), a collage series of magazine images of skin on marble tiles, which she started during the lockdown. She says the tiled walls in public spaces have become like skin surfaces that were feared during the pandemic, as touch has become complicated. She is fascinated by the contrast between the depth and time visible in a marble tile, created by age-old geographical processes, and the temporality of magazine paper. “Even though magazines – and mass media images in general – arrive as pristine, glowing objects in the mail or on the newsstand they are meant to disappear quickly and to become trash, to be replaced by the most recent up-to-date information,” she says.