A detail of an artwork by Michaël Borremans titled The Commuter II dated 2022

 (b. 1963) creates meticulously composed works that resist immediate interpretation and defy the illusion of stability and the reliability of representation, redefining the possibilities of contemporary painting through the union of technical mastery and disquieting imagery.

Spanning painting, drawing, film, and sculpture, Borremans’s oeuvre is shaped by a sustained paradox between precision and uncertainty. With a distinct tension that has a haunting relevance in our time, Borremans engages in his work timeless human concerns: power, vulnerability, ambiguity, and identity, probing the instability of meaning itself.

The artist was born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium, and in 1996 he received his M.F.A. from Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst, Campus St. Lucas, in Ghent. Borremans continues to live and work in Ghent. David Zwirner has represented the artist’s work since 2001. In 2024, the solo exhibition 

 was on view at David Zwirner, London. Previous solo presentations of the artist’s work at the gallery include 

Borremans’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of prominent institutions. In 2024, 

Michaël Borremans – A Confrontation at the Zoo

, a comprehensive solo exhibition was presented at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. The same year, Prada Rong Zhai opened 

, the presentation of which was installed in a 1918 historic home in the Jing’an district of Shanghai. In 2020, the two-person presentation, 

Michaël Borremans | Mark Manders: Double Silence

, was on view at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Also in 2020, 

 was on view at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague. 

was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain, in 2015–2016. A major museum survey, 

, which included one hundred works from the past two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. The exhibition traveled later in the year to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, followed by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2015. 

, the artist’s first solo museum show in Japan, was also on view in 2014 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

, a comprehensive solo show, was presented at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and traveled to the Műcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, and the Kunsthalle Helsinki. In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, as well as commissioned work on view at the Royal Palace in Brussels. Other venues that have hosted solo exhibitions include the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2009); de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2007); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent (2005; traveled to Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London; and Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin); Cleveland Museum of Art (2005); Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Germany (2004); and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2004).

Work by the artist is held in public collections internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Portrait of Michaël Borremans, 2025. Photo by Charlie De Keersmaecker 

Christine Kintisch

Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (born 1963) is among the most brilliant painters of emotion of the past half-century. An heir to the sober, enigmatic character studies of Manet and Velazquez and the thick indoor atmospheres of Vermeer, Borremans has greatly advanced this tradition, in part through his incorporation of cinematic allusion and of that uniquely Belgian take on Surrealism that is at once deeply phlegmatic and bizarrely comical. Any divisions between realism and flights of fantasy are mysteriously abolished by Borremans, however, leaving the viewer to confront his intense, almost claustrophobic painterly world. Published for an exhibition at BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna, 

 presents a concise selection of a dozen canvases made over the past five years, examined in dialogue with the artist’s drawings and films.

Michaël Borremans: Magnetics

Michaël Borremans: Magnetics | Books

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.