Framed Forms & Floating Fables

Deborah Bowmann | Baldvin Einarsson | Krystel Geerts | Joke Hansen | Ellen Meers | Hazel Ver Moesen

28 March - 3 May 2026 | Baudelostraat 23, 9000 Gent

An abstract or non-abstract form, or a symbol, is not brought to life instantaneously. It emerges through a process of insight, evolution, and the personal or sometimes impersonal history of its creator. Every form that comes into being therefore carries both a history and a future in which it can continue to evolve.

This group exhibition explores the story behind each form, where it originates and the potential directions in which it may grow. Each artist engages, in their own way, with the meaning and power of their distinctive visual language.

On view from 29 March until 3 May 2026

Baudelostraat 23
9000 Gent
contact us for available works or more information:
+32 (0)9 391 39 13
desk@barbegallery.be

Discover more about the participating artists

The artist duo Deborah Bowmann, which consists of Amaury Daurel and Victor Delestre, was established in Amsterdam in 2014 and has been based in Brussels since 2015. Their activities comprise curating exhibitions and producing sculptures, installations and set design.

As artist-entrepreneurs, they continue to invent models for presenting both their own work and that of others. This was demonstrated in projects at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021–2023, at the MLeuven in 2024, at the Prix de Fondation Ricard in 2018 or during their residency at Villa Medicis in 2025.

Baldvin Einarsson was born in 1985 in Iceland, where he studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts (L.H.Í.). In 2015, he obtained his Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he still lives and works. He is a co-founder of ABC Klubhuis, an exhibition space that has been active since 2017. Einarsson’s work is light-hearted and humorous, and rather introspective. The artist reflects on psychological situations and uses the body as an allegory for mental forces. With a playful wink, he explores personality and human interaction.

The sculptures of Krystel Geerts (born in 1993,NL. Currently resident at Rijksacademie in Amsterdam (NL)) emerge from a physical and tactile engagement with material. In her practice, the body acts as both instrument and measure: gestures, pressure, and exertion leave visible traces on the surface. Forms develop through a somatic and process driven approach, as she tests the limits of matter in a continuous dialogue between action and resistance. Geerts approaches the world as a field of folds in which shapes unfold, shift, and reorganize. Through this movement, matter condenses and meaning takes form, while distinctions between inside and outside, surface and depth, body and space dissolve. For her, thinking is not purely rational but embodied and sensory, a form of knowing that arises through making, touching, and responding to material.

In this recent glass work, a curling form hangs on the wall while simultaneously seeming to lean against it. The line evokes both baroque ornamentation and something that appears to emerge from the body, an extension, a limb, a tentacle. Drawing on the idea of tentacular thinking, which emphasizes connection and responsiveness between forms, bodies, and space, Geerts focuses on a single shape that stretches, bends, and folds back onto itself. The tentacular is not presented as an isolated entity, but as a mode of being in which everything emerges through relation, contact, and exchange.

Krystel Geerts is an interdisciplinary artist and currently a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She completed her bachelor’s degree at AKI in the Netherlands and obtained her master’s degree at KASK in Ghent. Her work has been exhibited at Saatchi Gallery in London, Galerie tegenboschvanvreden in Amsterdam, and Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, and she has had a solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang in Essen. Her work is included in public and private collections, including that of De Nederlandsche Bank.

Joke Hansen (°1979, Belgium) is a contemporary artist and painter. She lives in Bilzen and works in Hasselt. The constant questioning of painting as a medium lies at the core of Hansen’s practice. Her works — including paintings, collages and sculptural canvases — exist at the intersection of image and space. The starting point is always the canvas, which Hansen increasingly detaches from its traditional format. Her shaped canvases, for instance, break through rectangular boundaries and introduce new, autonomous forms into space. Her works are never static. They open up, break out, retreat and push back. Space is not merely used but consciously composed. In Hansen’s work, colour and form function as structuring elements within a playful, self-developed system that is deliberately interrupted and questioned. Her installations operate like levels in a game — the point is not to win, but to keep playing.

Ellen Meers (b. 1996) lives and works in Brussels. Her work is defined by a distinctive visual language in which symbols, patterns, and memories intertwine. With a foundation in drawing, Meers has developed a practice that merges the intimate with the archetypal. She exchanges paper for ceramic tiles and reliefs, where her symbols take on a tangible, almost ritualistic form. Engraving, painting, glazing, scratching each gesture contributes to a process in which meaning is never fixed but remains in constant flux. Her visual vocabulary draws from personal anecdotes, childhood memories, and shared narratives, which in her work transform into pictograms imbued with an elusive, almost talismanic presence. The symbols seem to repeat and shift, like fragments of a forgotten script or a codex just out of reach. Tiles become compositions, isolated images form sentences, patterns evolve into rhythms. Like hieroglyphs bridging the gap between image and language, Meers’ works create a space where interpretation and intuition take precedence. The individual becomes collective, the personal universal. And yet, in deciphering them, the viewer is always gently led back to themselves.

Hazel Ver Moesen (°2000) lives and works in Antwerp. In 2024, she obtained her Master’s degree in Fine Arts from KASK School of Arts in Ghent. Her practice primarily focuses on sculptural work in wood and steel, in which themes such as nature, landscape, ecology, archiving, and everyday objects repeatedly appear. Her work explores the relationships between humans, animals, and consumerism, expressed through forms that are both playful and critical. Traces of the making process remain visible in the work: a do-it-yourself mentality and a certain degree of imperfection are essential characteristics of her practice. She uses colour as a kind of timeline within her work. During different periods, she works with specific colour combinations that later give way to new palettes. In this way, colour marks distinct moments in her development. The sculptures also evoke memories and a sense of collective nostalgia.