Joanna De Vos - art historian and curator

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België
Antwerp
Joanna De Vos - art historian and curator

Curating contemporary art exhibitions

14/06/2026

Part guide, part companion. The person who turns ordinary journeys into adventures, answers questions with more questions, and reminds us that wonder is not something we outgrow.

Happy Father’s Day to an extraordinary father, artist, and companion in curiosity.

Watching our son discover the world alongside you is one of the great joys of my life.

The best adventures always seem to begin when the two of you are in the same boat. 🤍

Photo: By my own father, Guido De Vos.

12/06/2026

10 years! | A decade of exhibitions, conversations, travels, discoveries, and the privilege of working with extraordinary artists, institutions, collectors, and audiences along the way. And today, I’m delighted to launch my new website.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey so far. For the trust, the collaborations, the opportunities, the friendships, and the many shared moments of creativity along the way.

Still curious. Still keen.

04/06/2026

| Opening tomorrow in Paris: Michaël Borremans’ 'French Painting' at David Zwirner.

There are painters whose works offer answers. Borremans offers a lingering uncertainty.

His paintings draw on the visual language of art history, yet something is always slightly off balance. What continues to fascinate me is his ability to create images that feel at once familiar and unknowable.

In 'French Painting', Borremans turns his attention to the traditions of portraiture and still life, subtly unsettling both. Portraits begin to feel like objects. Tenderness and estrangement occupy the same space.

As Borremans has said, “I try to reflect on contemporary worlds through a historical view.” He is interested in “the visuals of today and the visuals of yesterday, because they are still present.”

Perhaps that is why his paintings stay with us. Not because they explain the world, but because they resist explanation. Twenty years after his last solo exhibition in France, this is firmly on my must-see list this summer.

Photograph: Michaël Borremans’ studio. Ghent, Belgium, 2026
© Michaël Borremans, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo by Cedric Verhelst

02/06/2026

Saddened to learn of the passing of Marie-Jo Lafontaine, an artist whose work occupied that rare space between spectacle and introspection.

I had the opportunity to work with Marie-Jo on 'The Circus We Are' in Namur (2022) and 'THE CLOWN SPIRIT – The Traveling Exhibition', both of which brought together works from different moments of her practice.

Working across photography, video, sound, and installation, Lafontaine expanded the possibilities of the image itself. Her works combined scale with emotional intensity, drawing viewers into experiences that are both immersive and thought-provoking. Looking back at photographs from the installation process in Namur, I am reminded of the privilege of bringing her work into dialogue with new audiences. What stays with me is the clarity of her vision and the conviction with which she pursued it.

Her voice in contemporary art was unmistakable. Her work remains.

31/05/2026

| Anish Kapoor at Palazzo Manfrin, Cannaregio, Venice. 6 May – 8 August 2026
One of the exhibitions I keep returning to in my mind from this year’s La Biennale di Venezia.

“For a long time I'd been thinking of my work as potential architecture. I've always been convinced by the idea that to create new art you have to create new space.”
— Anish Kapoor

That idea runs throughout the exhibition. Pictured here is a monumental new black-pigment iteration of At the Edge of the World (1998), suspended beneath the frescoed dome like an impossible presence. It seems to absorb the space around it, drawing the eye towards something that is simultaneously there and not there.

Kapoor has long been interested in what he calls the “non-object”: works that blur the boundaries between object, architecture, and perception. The exhibition’s remarkable collection of architectural models reveals this thinking in its purest form; fifty years of experiments with voids, cavities, cuts, and openings.

Palazzo Manfrin feels like the perfect setting for such work: a place where sculpture does not simply occupy space, but transforms it.

A Venice exhibition not to miss.

26/05/2026

A heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Femmy Otten on winning the ‘Per Abramsen Sculptuurprijs’ 2026. The prize is awarded by the Abramsen-Koedam Foundation in collaboration with the Beelden aan Zee museum.

Otten’s work moves effortlessly between vulnerability and strength, intimacy and monumentality, approaching themes such as motherhood, spirituality, sexuality, and care with extraordinary sensitivity.

From 27 June until 1 November, Museum Beelden aan Zee will present ‘Femmy Otten – Birthland’, a solo exhibition bringing together works that feel at once intimate and deeply human. I will be counting down.

Having previously had the pleasure of working with Femmy’s work within the context of The Circus We Are in Namur, this recognition feels especially deserved.

A beautiful recognition for an artist whose sculptures continue to widen both the language of sculpture and our understanding of what it means to be human.

Photo: Femmy Otten - One tear at a time, 2020. Galerie Fons Welters

22/05/2026

ORLAN AT THE LOUVRE | Some artists challenge aesthetics. ORLAN transforms provocation into a language of inquiry.
For decades, ORLAN has used performance, photography, sculpture, robotics, and new technologies to confront the politics of the body: how it is represented, idealised, controlled, censored and transformed.

Few artists have questioned the aesthetics and history of art with such sharpness and precision. It feels particularly fitting, then, that the has invited ORLAN to lead its 2026 artist lecture series today 22 May, 12 June, and 25 September. Across these conversations, she will bring her perspective to the museum’s collections and to the enduring dialogue between historical masterpieces and contemporary creation.

At the same time, ORLAN’s work continues to resonate far beyond institutional walls. Recently named among the artists who “changed the world” in the Centre Pompidou’s reflection on works from its collection that reshaped modern art, her practice feels as provocative and necessary as ever.

Her voice also carries through Venice this year, with her project ‘Nous sommes inconsolables’ currently on view at Palazzo Mora as part of ‘Personal Structures’ during the 2026 La Biennale di Venezia.

A practice that continues to unsettle certainty, blur boundaries, and refuse easy conclusions.

Image: ORLAN, © musée du Louvre 2025 / Claire Delfino

20/05/2026

Curious Matters | A Way with Words - Diving into the depths of expression, the exquisite use of language in art.

Joseph Kosuth has spent decades turning language inside out, slowing it down enough for us to notice how unstable meaning really is. In works such as 'Titled (Art As Idea As Idea) [question]', pictured here, a dictionary entry becomes strangely theatrical once lifted from the page and placed on the wall. Clinical at first glance, yet unexpectedly philosophical. The closer you read, the less fixed it feels.

Kosuth’s current exhibition ‘The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero’ at Casa dei Tre Oci, is less about language itself than about what happens around language: context, authority, interpretation, repetition…doubt. One moment, you are reading definitions. Next, you are questioning who defines meaning in the first place.

Throughout the exhibition, language becomes a way of measuring ourselves against the spaces we inhabit, asking how meaning shifts between the body, the city, and the structures surrounding us.

A rigorous yet deeply poetic exhibition, where philosophy, conceptual art, and the layered atmosphere of Venice continuously fold into one another.

Curated by Mario Codognato and Adriana Rispoli for Berggruen Arts & Culture and Berggruen Institute Europe.

Adres

Antwerp

Website

http://www.joannadevos.be/

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