Exceptional Works: Michaël Borremans

“My work is two things at the same time: It’s holding a mirror onto the complex, often dark facets of human nature while borrowing a very familiar vocabulary of classic portraiture.”

—Michaël Borremans

Michaël Borremans

The Ear (II), 2011

Oil on canvas

41 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches (105 x 80 cm)

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Over the last twenty-five years, Michaël Borremans (b. 1963) has gained international recognition for his innovative approach to painting. Combining technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation, his charged canvases address universal themes with a contemporary complexity.

An exquisite painting made in 2011, The Ear (II) exemplifies the distinctive composition, subdued yet luminous palette, and enigmatic atmosphere that characterize Borremans’s work and that recently led a New York Times critic to call him “the greatest living figurative painter.” This work is featured on the occasion of the gallery's presentation at Paris+.

Michaël Borremans, The Ear (II), 2011 (detail)

The back of a woman's torso and head are set against a dark background. Her left ear is prominently spotlit in a tone that appears to reveal the underpainting. The figure is captured in a compelling state of indeterminacy, creating, in the artist’s own words, “an atmosphere outside time, a space where time has been canceled.”

Like an archetype capable of embodying shifting meanings, this figure becomes a mold for the human condition, at once satirical, tragic, humorous and, above all, contradictory. The present painting relates to The Ear, a smaller work from the same year which focuses more closely on the subject’s shoulders and head.

Michaël Borremans, The Ear (II), 2011

Michaël Borremans, The Ear, 2011

“A painting of someone turning away defies portraiture.… Despite how delicately, even realistically, her hair, her skin, her clothes are rendered, she’s an abstraction; a formal exercise in secrecy, her body reduced to plane, volume and colour.”

—Jennifer Higgie, Frieze

Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988. Saint Louis Art Museum (left); Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Baigneuse, Dite Baigneuse de Valpinçon (The Bather, Called the Bather of Valpinçon), 1808. Courtesy: Musée du Louvre, Paris (right)

“Borremans anticipates the lineage in which critics and historians will place him,” Jeffrey Grove writes, “then sends those comparisons down a rabbit hole. In a neat model of the evolution of art, Borremans’s work is a mutant in a five-piece suit: an evasive omnivore that devours van Eyck with as much pleasure as it does Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Francis Bacon.”

Spread from MICHAËL BORREMANS: SHADES OF DOUBT, 2012

Installation view, Michaël Borremans: The Acrobat, David Zwirner, New York, 2019

“I do not paint fact and I do not paint portraits.”

—Michaël Borremans

Installation view, Michaël Borremans: The Duck, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, 2020. Photo by Martin Polak

“He renders skin with such intensity that the living, breathing, blood-coursing nature of the human being becomes vividly alive.… As if a solid thing suddenly has emerged from some elusive vaporous material.”

—John Vincler, The New York Times

Michaël Borremans, The Ear (II), 2011 (detail)

Michaël Borremans, 2020. Photo by Alex Salinas

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Michaël Borremans

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