PRESENTATION:Carole Vanderlinden-Keep a promise

Carole Vanderlinden’s () artistic practice, which she has been developing since the mid-1990s, is primarily focused on painting but also encompasses drawing, watercolour, collage and small objects. In “Keep a promise”, her first museum solo exhibition she presents a selection of paintings and works on paper from the past five years.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive

Carole Vanderlinden’s paintings and works on paper immediately capture the imagination. Their power lies in how diversity is freely approached and foregrounded. Even as a child, Vanderlinden discovered that art could be a way to explore the world – to immerse herself in it by engaging with diverse cultures, techniques, and forms of expression across disciplines. Faced with the complexity of life, painting and drawing became a means to observe and gather a multitude of visual details, enabling her to participate more fully in her surroundings.

Her work is simple and compact yet highly layered at the same time. In the creative process, the artist works without a preconceived plan. Depending on the materials, colour and rhythm, she allows compositions to develop gradually on paper or canvas. In this process, she draws on images from her personal memories, details from her research notebooks, and references to art history, literature, music and philosophy. In unexpected yet deliberate ways, she creates new connections and patterns that resist a single, unambiguous meaning.

For Vanderlinden, each painting and drawing is a meeting place with her audience. Drawing on their own experiences, the visitors are offered the freedom to interpret what they see. In this way, they help to complete the work.

Carole Vanderlinden’s oeuvre does not follow the classic narrative of artistic development, in which an artist’s work is often read chronologically, as a journey culminating in a ‘final’ vision or in clearly defined series. Over the years, Vanderlinden’s same energetic, improvisational visual language persists, while motifs, themes and brushstrokes recur, such as the house, the mask and the zigzag stripe. She creates change by continually playing, varying and experimenting within this framework.

Photo: Carole Vanderlinden, Face to Face, 2025. Oil on canvas, 30 x 39,5 cm. Photo: HV-studio, © Carole Vanderlinden, Courtesy the artist and S.M.A.K.

Info: Curator: Ann Hoste, S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1, Gent, Belgium, Duration: 30/5-11/10/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://smak.be/