Feb 16, 2026 Artist in Focus

Bart Gielen: Timeless Weight

Artist in Focus: Bart Gielen works between drawing and ceramics, where restraint, tension and material weight shape images that resist clear narrative and remain deliberately elusive.

Bart Gielen -> Artist in Focus - Bart Gielen - Image Courtesy of the Artist / Unframed Gallery

Between image and object.

Bart Gielen – Drawing & Ceramics

Bart Gielen, born in 1983 in Belgium, lives and works in Kanegem. His practice moves between drawing and ceramics, often collapsing the distinction between image and object. What appears at first as a historical residue or a fragment from another time gradually reveals itself as a contemporary position grounded in hesitation, weight and ambiguity. Gielen’s works do not aim for immediacy. They ask for duration.

“I want my work to be timeless and elusive” Bart Gielen

Central to his practice is the tension between familiarity and unease. Gielen works with existing imagery, drawn from art history, media sources and personal archives, yet never treats these references as quotations. Through distortion, framing and material intervention, he shifts their emotional register. Ceramic frames, supports and vessels are not neutral carriers but active components that thicken the image, adding physical resistance and presence. Light and shadow are handled with restraint, producing depth without spectacle.

Gielen’s work operates in a zone of quiet friction. His images hover between protection and threat, intimacy and distance, stillness and latent movement. Rather than offering narrative clarity, they remain open, holding contradictory states at once.

This refusal of resolution positions his practice within a contemporary context that values ambiguity as a condition, not a problem, and material sensitivity as a form of though

Bart Gielen on Instagram