Magdalene Odundo @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - Ceramic Vessels and a Large-Scale Glass Installation

Magdalene Odundo

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

13 November 2025 —​ 24 January 2026

Xavier Hufkens presents Kenyan-born British artist Magdalene Odundo’s first exhibition at the gallery. Featuring a new body of ceramic vessels and the large-scale glass installation Transition II (2014), the exhibition showcases the two central disciplines that shape her artistic practice.

At the heart of the exhibition is a recent series of ceramic vessels, a form that has been a cornerstone of Odundo’s practice for nearly five decades. These vessels, refined in shape and rich in symbolism, draw inspiration from a wide array of global ceramic traditions—African, European, Asian, and Indigenous American – as by the human body, which Magdalene Odundo likewise regards as a vessel. Her work carries a distinct anthropomorphic presence: gestures, physical states and bodily movements often serve as starting points for a vessel’s form, silhouette, proportion or balance. As one of the oldest and most universal of human-made objects, vessels transcend time, geography and culture. Moreover, they are rich with dualities: inside and outside, fullness and emptiness, fragility and strength. These oppositions echo the deeper conceptual themes in the artist’s oeuvre, such as transition, identity and cultural hybridity. For Magdalene Odundo, the vessel is more than a physical object. It is an archetypal and elemental form through which to articulate relationships – between materials, histories, cultures and individuals.

The making of each vessel is a laborious and intensely physical act. Working alone, Magdalene Odundo hand-builds her vessels using coiling techniques before meticulously burnishing their surfaces. The distinctive colours – typically deep terracotta and lustrous black – emerge from a controlled firing process. This slow, embodied method underscores the intimate relationship between maker and material. In Odundo’s practice, the vessel is not a static object, but a living entity. Left unglazed, the works retain a subtle porosity, enhancing their sense of life and allowing them, quite literally, to "breathe."

Also on view is Transition II (2014), a large-scale installation comprising 1001 suspended glass vessels. Each vessel is individually mouth-blown yet they are united by a formal coherence that balances repetition and variation. In contrast to Odundo’s ceramic practice, which is a solitary activity, glass-blowing is a collective endeavour. The vessels in Transition II are inspired by an ancient Egyptian glass earplug in the Petrie Museum in London, a reflection of Odundo’s ongoing engagement with historical forms and cross-cultural material references. The resulting objects appear to hover in space: weightless and precarious; they are ‘hanging by a thread’. Glass, like clay, is an ancient and elemental medium, both ubiquitous and fragile, that is transformed by fire. In a phenomenon known as the ‘melt memory effect’, it retains information about its previous crystalline structure, even after heating above its glass transition temperature. These qualities are central to Transition II, and resonate with broader themes in Odundo’s practice.

The installation draws visual and conceptual parallels with a murmuration – a phenomenon in which large flocks of starlings move in coordinated, shape-shifting formations. Within this work, each glass shape maintains its singularity while simultaneously contributing to an energetic, collective rhythm. In an era increasingly marked by fragmentation and estrangement, Transition II speaks of gathering and mutual recognition, whereby uniqueness and difference contribute to a dynamic whole.

Magdalene A N Odundo (b. 1950) received her initial training as a graphic artist in Kenya before moving to the UK in 1971. She studied at the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. In 2018, Magdalene Odundo was appointed Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts (UCA) and was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year Honours list in 2020. She has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England (2024); the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada (2023-2024); The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England and Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, England (2019); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, USA (2017); British Council, Nairobi, Kenya (2005); Blackwell House, Bowness-on-Windermere, England (2001); The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., USA (1995); Stedelijk Museum Voor Hedendaagse Kunst, s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (1994); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; and Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany (1992).

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Cecilia Vicuna @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Arch Future" Exhibition + Online Exhibition "Cecilia Vicuña: Selected Video Works"

Cecilia Vicuña: Arch Future

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

5 June — 2 August 2025

“I focus on native ‘writing’ and ‘non-writing’ systems of my Andean universe, to bring their creative potential back into the world, addressing the untreated grief of colonisation.”

— Cecilia Vicuña

Arch Future (archaic future) marks the debut exhibition of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña with the gallery. Spanning over sixty years, the show brings together every element of her expansive interdisciplinary practice, including three site-specific installations — two monumental quipus and a room-size precario installation ­— alongside drawings, paintings, poetry, archival materials, sound, and film. Included are some of what the artist refers to as “Lost Paintings,” recent recreations of paintings from the 1960s and 70s that were lost or destroyed following the Chilean military coup. The exhibition also marks the European premiere of her recent film poem, Death of the Pollinators (2021). The title Arch Future reflects Vicuña’s sustained engagement with indigenous knowledge systems and local ecosystems as visionary, alternative forms of architecture ­— tools for imagining a more sustainable and just future.

The exhibition opens with Quipu Menstrual (2006-2024), a dense, sculptural installation of unspun wool in vivid shades of red and brown that is suspended from the ceiling. For over fifty years, Cecilia Vicuña has been creating quipus ­— striking embodiments of an ancestral, non-alphabetic communication system rooted in Andean culture. Traditionally used in pre-Columbian civilisations as three-dimensional records, quipus encoded knowledge and transmitted messages ­— perhaps even stories ­— through intricate systems of colour, knotting, and placement. Vicuña reclaims and reactivates this ancient language as a living symbol of memory, resistance, and embodied wisdom.

Vicuña’s quipus often emerge as poetic responses to ecological, social, or political urgencies. They are never static but evolve in dialogue with each site and community, absorbing its energy and context. Quipu Menstrual grew out of The Blood of Glaciers / La sangre de los glaciares, a performance on Chile’s El Plomo Glacier (2006), where Vicuña first drew a symbolic parallel between menstrual blood and melting ice ­— both vital, cyclical, and under threat. This poetic gesture underscores the fragility of ecosystems as well as the life-giving power of the feminine.

Installed nearby in the double-height gallery is the white monochromatic quipu Forest Son (2025), a site-specific “child” continuation of her celebrated Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern, Brain Forest Quipu (2022). Composed of unspun wool, rope, cardboard, plant fibres, and found materials, this work resonates with symbolic meaning. Here, the quipu becomes a mournful elegy for environmental destruction and the ongoing violence against Indigenous communities. At once lament and portal for alternative forms of knowledge, it invites reflection on our shared responsibility ­— and illustrates ways of interconnected knowledge.

Death of the Pollinators (2021) is a powerful meditation on ecological collapse and interdependence. Created with the participation of Colombian musician Ricardo Gallo and American filmmaker Robert Kolodny, the work combines Vicuña’s poetry and chant with immersive visual and sonic textures to address the alarming global decline of bees (in the European Union alone, an estimated 78% of wildflowers and 84% of crop plants depend on pollinators for their survival — yet many of these vital species are now on the brink of extinction). The film seamlessly transitions from bees navigating clouds of pollen, symbolising their vital importance, to the visually stunning and glittering appearance of honey, evoking a sense of celestial beauty and abundance. Its finale, bathed in red, alludes to climate warming decimating bees and the devastating fires erupting in the hottest parts of the world. Sound is central to the work’s impact: referencing sonification ­— the process by which certain bees release pollen through vibration ­— Cecilia Vicuña draws a parallel between natural resonance and collective awakening.

Downstairs, Cecilia Vicuña debuts a new large-scale precario installation, entitled Ciudad Geométrica (2025). The installation fills the gallery with quiet intensity, forming a sort of minimalist and precarious “geometric city.” Composed of ephemeral materials such as driftwood, feathers, shells, bones, stones, and scraps of fabric, the installation brings together elements collected in Belgium, Chile, and New York. Here, Vicuña responds directly to the space’s architectural geometry with assemblages that form a poem in space. Trained in architecture before turning to art, Cecilia Vicuña also alludes to the sculptural dimension of stonework in Andean pre-Columbian architecture. Her precarios challenge conventional ideas of art, particularly sculpture, as immutable and eternal, offering instead a poetic counterpoint to the exploitative practices of colonisation and capitalism. These works speak to cycles of disappearance and resurgence, fragility and endurance. As Cecilia Vicuña notes, they offer a way to “see the unseen,” illuminating the interconnectedness of all life.

The upper galleries are dedicated to Vicuña’s paintings, including a selection of new versions of her abstract works, Pinturas Solares (Solar Paintings) that she originally made in Chile between 1965 and 1967, when she was aged seventeen to nineteen. In 1972, she moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, but following the 1973 military coup that violently ended the government of Salvador Allende, she was forced into exile, leaving behind her earliest paintings, which were eventually destroyed or lost. For Arch Future, she has repainted some of them, reconnecting with the origins of her long and multifaceted practice. Although widely recognised today for her quipus and precarios, Cecilia Vicuña often emphasises that she began as a poet and a painter. Her early canvases reflect an intuitive engagement with shamanic ritual ­— brujo meaning “shaman” ­— and the “soft geometry” inherent in Andean visual languages. These compositions are infused with references to Nasca textiles, pre-Columbian iconography, fungi, and myths surrounding altered states of consciousness, linking the ancestral with the visionary in a continuum of cultural memory.

Vicuña’s sound piece, Honguito niño (Fungi child), created in collaboration with Giuliana Furci and Cosmo Sheldrake, focuses on the rediscovery of the Psilocybe stametsii. This rare and elusive mushroom, first documented by Dr. Brian Dentinger in 2011, was seen again in the cloud forests of Ecuador by mycologist Giuliana Furci, a friend of the artist. Known for its tiny, solitary form ­— no taller than a matchstick ­— it has only been observed twice, each time as a single, inconspicuous specimen blending into the decaying leaf litter. Though part of the diverse Psilocybe genus, its singular presence has captured imaginations across disciplines. Like bees, fungi are essential to the Earth’s ecosystems, playing a crucial role in nutrient cycling, symbiotic relationships, and forest regeneration. Yet they too face existential threats from climate change, deforestation, and pesticides. This enigmatic sound work brings together ancestral sound techniques and layered voices ­— including those of fungi conservationists ­— to create an immersive, otherworldly composition. The piece is both elegy and incantation, channelling the silent resilience of the forest and its hidden life, in dialogue with the painting inspired by the mushroom’s reappearance in the dark undergrowth ­— a symbol of quiet survival and the possibility of rebirth after devastation.

As an extension of Arch Future, Cecilia Vicuña presents a curated selection of her video works in an online exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: Selected Video Works on view until 23 August. The films selected for the exhibition range from some of her earliest works from the 1980s to more recent productions, spanning formats including animation and documentary.

CECILIA VICUNA (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile) lives and works between Santiago and New York. She received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, Italy in 2022. In 2023-2024, a major travelling retrospective has been jointly organised by Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), Santiago; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA); and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Other recent solo exhibitions include: MOCA, Tucson (2023); Tate Modern, London (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022); Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Bogotá (2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid (2021); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC Mexico City (2020); and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2020), among others.

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels 

www.xavierhufkens.com

Nathanaëlle Herbelin @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "And there is a place you will not be able to return to" Exhibition

Nathanaëlle Herbelin

And there is a place you will not be able to return to

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Through 21 June 2025

Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s exhibition at Xavier Hufkens (the second at the gallery) presents a new series of portraits and interiors that navigate the fragile balance between immediate, everyday experience and the weight of an unsettled world. At once intimate and expansive, these paintings reflect a desire to hold on to moments of connection―small yet significant interactions with friends, neighbours, and family―amidst an undercurrent of grief, uncertainty, and shifting realities. Herbelin’s approach is neither sentimental nor detached; rather, she paints with an acute awareness of how personal and collective histories intertwine. The act of painting becomes a way to ground herself, to acknowledge absence, and to bear witness to both quiet rituals and emotional thresholds.

While Herbelin’s earlier works were characterised by vibrant colours and clearly defined settings, the paintings in this exhibition embrace ambiguity. Figures emerge from undefined or weighty backgrounds, emphasising presence over place, memory over setting. Arie, the artist’s late grandfather from Israel, is painted posthumously from photographs. His depiction resists traditional hierarchies of representation—someone who might not typically be immortalised on canvas is here granted a quiet yet steadfast visibility. Herbelin’s gaze is both tender and unflinchingly honest, stripping away embellishment to reveal the raw intimacy of her subjects.

The absent presence of Herbelin’s late grandfather can also be felt in two of Herbelin’s works depicting Jewish mourning rituals. In Shiva, Nathanaëlle Herbelin reconstructs, from memory, a bird’s-eye view of her grandfather’s home during shiva, the seven-day mourning period following a funeral. The painting reflects the charged atmosphere of this ritual, in which the bereaved remain at home, marking their loss through time-honoured rituals: sitting on low chairs, covering mirrors, and lighting a candle in remembrance. The second, larger work on this theme, Dîner aux œufs durs [Dinner with Hard-Boiled Eggs], interprets the Se’udat Havra’ah, the meal of condolence that follows a burial. Hard-boiled eggs―along with bagels, lentils and other round foods―are central to this meal, symbolising the cycle of life and renewal. The composition of the painting takes inspiration from Egon Schiele’s Die Freunde (Tafelrunde), groß [The Friends (Round Table), Large], 1918. Just as Schiele painted his own circle of friends gathered around the table, Nathanaëlle Herbelin populates Dîner aux œufs durs with her own acquaintances as well as imagined figures.

While portraits remain central to Herbelin’s practice, her nuanced depictions of interior spaces are equally poignant in conveying mood and atmosphere, revealing the psychological depths of her subjects. Two interior scenes, in particular, evoke contrasting realities and psychological spaces: one depicting a desolate kitchen, Ustensiles, and the other, Jérémie qui donne le biberon, portraying the artist’s partner, Jérémie, feeding their baby in a hotel room in China where the artist recently completed a residency. The panoramic view framed by the window in the latter painting contrasts starkly with the small, barely visible window in the kitchen, a subtle indicator of confinement and diminished hope. Similarly, the personal possessions on the hotel table stand in contrast to their near-total absence in the kitchen, despite other clues suggesting a recent human presence. The latter painting holds the quiet act of care in tension with the busy, impersonal cityscape beyond, reflecting the contrast between private tenderness and the vastness of the outside world.

The interplay between interior and exterior spaces―both literal and psychological―in this new body of work mirrors the artist’s negotiation of past and present, presence and absence. Whether reconstructing her grandfather’s apartment from memory, capturing the transient intimacy of a shared meal, or painting figures from her neighbourhood, Herbelin’s works resist easy narratives. Instead, her paintings offer a space where the everyday and the existential coexist, where the act of looking itself becomes an act of recognition.

The exhibition title comes from the poem Eyes Sadness and Journey Descriptions (עצבות עיניים ותיאורי מסע), from the book Behind All This, Hides Great Happiness (מאחורי כל זה מסתתר אושר גדול) by Yehuda Amichai.

NATHANAELLE HERBELIN (b. 1989, Tel Aviv, Israel) obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, during which time she was invited to participate in an exchange programme at The Cooper Union, New York. Herbelin’s first solo exhibition in Asia, Feel the pulse, opened at the He Art Museum in Shunde, China (8 March to 8 June 2025). It  showcases the works made during her residency at the museum in 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include Être ici est une splendeur, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2024); À la surface, le fond de l’oeil, French Institute of Tel Aviv (2022); Et peut-être que ces choses n’ont jamais eu lieu, Umm Al Fahem Palestinian Art Center (2021), Devenire Peinture, Yishu 8 prize, George V Art Centre, Beijing (2021); and group exhibitions such as the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2021); Passerelle Art Center, Brest (2020); the museums of the Abbaye Sainte-Croix (Sables d’Olonnes, 2019); Bétonsalon, Paris (2019); the Beaux-Arts Museum of Rennes (2018), Collection Lambert, Avignon (2017) and Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017).

XAVIER HUFKENS

44 rue Van Eyck, Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Nathanaëlle Herbelin: And there is a place you will not be able to return to

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 23 April — 21 June 2025

Alice Neel Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Alice Neel

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

26 February - 11 April 2015

Xavier Hufkens presents the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Alice Neel (1900-1984). Drawn from the artist’s estate, the presentation includes paintings from all periods of Neel’s career, together with a selection of drawings. This is the first showing of her work in Belgium.

Born in Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and carved out a career as an artist in New York, often in difficult circumstances. Neel’s dedication to the ‘unfashionable’ art of portrait painting and social realism – and this during the decades of abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism – ensured that her work remained permanently out of kilter with avant-garde artistic developments. To quote Jeremy Lewison, advisor to the Alice Neel Estate, ‘she was isolated in a sea of changing styles’. While this was reflected in a lack of commercial and critical success during her most productive years, a retrospective organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 confirmed a groundswell of belated recognition. After her death in 1984, critical interest in Neel’s work further intensified and led to a series of landmark exhibitions in Europe. Alice Neel is today recognised as one of the greatest American figurative painters of the twentieth century.

Alice Neel’s posthumous success is intimately connected to her profound social conscience and idiosyncratic choice of sitters. Working across six decades of radical social and political upheaval, Neel’s approach to her art was uncompromising and unwavering. Passionately interested in the trials and tribulations of everyday life, and the desperate struggle to survive in what she called the ‘rat race of New York’, Alice Neel interacted with people from all walks of life. A self-described ‘collector of souls’, Alice Neel’s work provides an illuminating insight into the cultural, countercultural and multicultural circles in which she moved. Furthermore, she often tackled subjects that were perceived as ‘risky’ during her lifetime: Alice Neel is known for painting gay people long before homosexuality was legalised, transvestites, members of the poor, immigrant communities in Spanish Harlem (where she lived), candid portraits of nursing and pregnant women as well as unflinching male and female nudes.

Among Alice Neel’s greatest gifts were her remarkable mastery of her chosen medium and her unique ability to plumb the inner psychological depths of her sitters, whom she always painted from life. She began painting in the 1920s but it was not till the early 1930s that she really got into her stride, a period represented in the exhibition by her sober portrait Martin Jay (1932). When she moved from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she turned her attention to the local immigrant community, many of whom lived on the margins of society and were afflicted by the poverty of the Depression years. Alvin Simon (1959) and Mother and Child (1962) are classic works of this type. Neel’s gradual acceptance into the art world saw her not only begin to paint her fellow artists, but also a whole host of other figures involved in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1960s and 70s. Her portraits of the writer, poet and editor Michael Benedikt (1967) and the graphic designer and scenographer Ron Kajiwara (1970) are typical in this respect. Alice Neel also painted infants and members of her own family. Three portraits of children, painted at different periods of her life, and one of her daughter-in-law Ginny, a frequent sitter, are also on display.

While Alice Neel perfectly captured the zeitgeist of her age, the visceral honesty and analytical clarity of her work renders it both timeless and universal. Reflecting upon painting, she explained: ‘It was more than a profession. It was even a therapy, for there I just told it as it was. It takes a lot of courage in life to tell it how it is.’

In recent years, Alice Neel’s work has been the subject of a major survey of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (touring to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet, Malmö, 2010) and a retrospective exhibition of drawings at the Nordiska Akvarellmeuseet, Skärhamn (2013). Smaller solo exhibitions have been held at Victoria Miro, London (2014), the Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea (2013), David Zwirner, New York (2012) and Aurel Scheibler, Berlin (2011). Her work has been included in many important group shows, most recently Face Value. Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction, National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2014), Paint Made Flesh at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (touring to the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, 2008) and Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (touring to PS1, New York and Vancouver Art Gallery, 2007). Her work has also been written about extensively.

XAVIER HUFKENS 

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels 

www.xavierhufkens.com