Coup de Soleil

Adelheid De Witte

7 February - 15 March 2026 - Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent

Adelheid De Witte’s solo exhibition ‘Coup de Soleil’ opens on Saturday 7 February 2026 at our space in Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent. Five years after her 1st solo exhibition ‘There are Fireworks after 11pm’ in 2020 we are proud to present Adelheid De Witte’s 2nd solo exhibition ‘Coup de Soleil’.

Adelheid De Witte (b. 1982, Roeselare, BE, lives and works in Ghent) is known for her abstractions of overwhelming sceneries, which are brought into balance by playful, sometimes mysterious and surprising elements that are incorporated into the work in a variety of ways. Time and again, the Belgian artist succeeds in reshuffling the core elements that define her practice, maintaining the tension between gravity and playfulness while achieving a wide range of variations in their execution. Starting from her paintings, Adelheid De Witte further extends this visual language across different media, ranging from works on paper to installations. These works invariably evoke a sense of nostalgia, memories, and her childhood. In this process, she actively seeks out materials, colours, and physical supports; such as accounting papers from her grandparents’ building materials business, a place that has inspired her from an early age.

For the exhibition Coup de Soleil, De Witte revisits this nostalgic line of thought and develops it further through new elements drawn from memory. The weight of childhood recollections is once again brought into balance by specific symbols that refer to her childhood holidays in the South of France. In short, this exhibition, both literally and figuratively, casts light on fundamental human paradoxes: the simultaneous longing for tension and relaxation, control and letting go, distance and closeness, warmth and cooling.

Her work has been presented in a wide range of gallery and institutional contexts in Belgium and abroad. Since her solo exhibition There Are Fireworks After 11 PM at BARBÉ in 2020, she has been represented by the gallery, which has presented her work at art fairs including Art Brussels, Art Antwerp, and Art on Paper. In recent years, BARBÉ has also included her work in several group exhibitions. In addition, her work has been shown at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle, BE) as part of the Biennial of Painting; Plus One & Sofie Van de Velde (Antwerp, BE); Villa Les Zéphyrs (Westende, BE); Waldburger Wouters (Brussels, BE); Cadogan (London, UK); Irene Laub (Brussels, BE); and de boer gallery (Los Angeles, USA). In 2024, the city of Roeselare invited De Witte to present a retrospective exhibition at Ter Posterie, titled Flagada, curated by Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte. On the occasion of this exhibition, a publication of the same title was released during the solo project exhibition Rock to the Beat at BARBÉ in Ghent. Coup de Soleil marks her second solo exhibition at BARBÉ.

Coup de Soleil

Where the title of Adelheid De Witte’s first solo exhibition referred to fireworks as a metaphor for something that suddenly appears within our field of vision, Coup de Soleil (literally translated as “sunstroke”) once again introduces a title that evokes summer evenings. Evenings in which an excess of heat and sunlight lingers, the skin feels just a little too warm, and the body temperature becomes subtly or more markedly disrupted.

The works presented in Coup de Soleil do not depict the literal effects of sunstroke, but they do convey a sense of this disturbance. Something feels off. There is too much, too intense, or simply something that does not quite make sense. A beach parasol that no longer serves its purpose (J’ai Pensé au Parasol, oil on linen, 13 × 18 cm), a bright orange, diffuse light that nearly blinds us (Waar is mijn Zonnebril?, oil on linen, 200 × 170 cm), an inaccessible beach (Plage Sauvage I & II, oil on linen, 24 × 30 cm), or the words Merci de ne pas toucher aux œuvres (Merci, oil on linen, 13 × 18 cm).

This final phrase, painted in oil on a small canvas with thick layers of paint, is one we all recognise. Museum visitors are regularly reminded not to touch the artworks on display. Within the context of this solo exhibition, however, the meaning of this phrase, like the painting itself, is layered. On the one hand, it may evoke the experience of visiting a museum on a hot summer’s day, where the cool interior offers a welcome pause from excessive heat. On the other hand, the phrase points to a clear rule: one must not touch. Such a rule would not exist if there were no desire to touch artworks, to explore them in a more tactile way. Merci de ne pas toucher aux œuvres also implies distance. Looking is allowed, proximity is not. Seen in this light, the work speaks about closeness, or rather, the impossibility of it. About how close one can come to something or someone that attracts us, in which we perceive a certain beauty.

From Coup de Soleil, the step toward Coup de Foudre is not far. Coup de Foudre, the French expression for love at first sight, literally translates as lightning strike and refers to the sudden, intense, and overwhelming nature of falling in love with something or someone you have only just seen or met. It is often an unexpected attraction that throws you off balance. Once again, a disruption.

This tension between the predictable and the unpredictable, between the expected and the unexpected, has long been present in Adelheid De Witte’s work. Earlier reference was made to the title of her first gallery solo exhibition, There Are Fireworks at 11 PM, which took the sudden appearance of visual effects in the sky as its guiding principle. Other contrasts frequently found in her works on paper and canvas include those between warm and cool colours, blurred and sharp forms, and light and shadow. In works such as Un Rayo del Sol (oil on paper) and A Ray of Light (oil on paper), these qualities are rendered almost literally, as a colour spectrum in relation to its shadow side. In other works, these contrasts manifest primarily within a distinctly South French atmosphere, characterised by a blend of Mediterranean warmth, vivid hues, and rustic elegance. This evokes a sense of escape from everyday life and highlights attempts to enjoy life, both literally and figuratively. Think of the characteristic blue, red, or yellow striped fabrics of beach chairs and windbreaks, sporadically appearing floral motifs, weathered materials and colours shaped by outdoor exposure, or carefully arranged finds collected after beachcombing.

In Buit van een Strandjutter (oil on linen, 200 × 170 cm), for example, a rope composed of various interlinked colours is depicted as an artefact. In the background, blue and red tones merge into a gradient. Temporally, the scene could represent either sunrise or sunset, the ideal moment for a beachcomber to scan the tide line for natural treasures, historical objects such as coins and shards, or man made remnants like sea glass and ropes. These elements most often wash ashore after a storm, once calm has returned to the coast. Here again, a connection emerges with another recurring motif in De Witte’s work: restless, abstract cloudscapes suggesting approaching or receding storms.

Clouds, like the sun, are a recurring theme in philosophy. They are often associated with transience, dreams, and the duality between the visible and the hidden. The sun or light, by contrast, frequently symbolises knowledge, truth, and the good. Plato famously used the image of the sun to define the true nature of the good. Without it, just as without sunlight, we would perceive only the shadows of the material world, without grasping its essence. Too much sun or light, however, can point to overwhelming awareness, blinding arrogance, or a loss of nuance. In more contemporary terms, one might speak of schone schijn, a beautiful illusion. The glossy veneer that settles like an Instagram filter over a utopian existence, where more and brighter are automatically equated with better, until one burns. Or, put differently, until one suffers a coup de soleil.

Contact us for more information or to request a preview catalog:
📞 +32 (0) 9 391 39 13
✉️ desk@barbegallery.be