All tagged Painting
Libasse Ka’s paintings offer inventive solutions to thoroughly painterly problems. Take an untitled canvas from 2025, which features a dark silhouette of an umbrella that Ka painted on a piece of newspaper and then pressed onto the surface of his canvas, transferring the image before throwing the newspaper away. Painting the umbrella directly on the canvas “would have been too literal,” he explained when I visited his Brussels studio.
Indeed, rather than two sections divided by a wall – an unfortunate Cold War metaphor if ever there was one – the exhibition could be viewed as an expansive survey, a growing family or an inventory of universal humanism. There is something about the way that Neel depicts bodies – often fat, flaccid and wrinkled, circumscribed with heavy black contours and modelled with undulating impasto brushstrokes – which almost seems to caress their flickering forms into being. Her fearless and loving approach to rendering the human figure in all of its beauty, ugliness and diversity speaks to Neel’s warmth, love and openness towards others. To that end, Pompidou’s mezzanine-level gallery is perfect for this small, dense retrospective. Connected to the pedestrian streets outside by floor-to-ceiling windows, this space gives visitors the impression of being, like Neel’s painting, among and with the masses of humankind.
