In the entrance hall of GNYP Gallery, Nadia Guerroui (b. 1988, FR) has created a new site-specific installation. Taking the distinctive glass dome, which bathes the space in light, as her starting point, she uses a projection and colour filter to immerse the entrance in a dreamlike blue, reminiscent of a swimming pool. It is a poetic reversal of the usual order, much like a winter garden artificially brings nature indoors. Through her work, Guerroui creates subtle sensory experiences, such as reflections and mirror effects, that sharpen our perception.
Wesley Meuris (b. 1977, BE) has long explored the ways in which our gaze is conditioned, both in zoos and museums—both, incidentally, products of the Enlightenment ideal and of a desire to order and understand reality in order to dominate it. Several works by Meuris are on view in Un Jardin d’Hiver. Among them is a floor plan of a (fictional) botanical garden. While winter gardens have a more domestic and intimate dimension, botanical gardens, as scientific institutions, serve a more educational purpose. Botanical gardens also played an important role in the colonial project, serving as showcases for vegetation from the colonies, displayed in temples of glass and wrought iron. In Meuris’s work, a visit to a winter garden or entomological museum takes on a more ironic dimension, with references to the growing importance of the experience economy—a development increasingly evident in museums as well.
Bruno V. Roels (b. 1976, BE) plays with the visual language of paradise by focusing on palm trees, the quintessential symbol of exoticism. Roels works with analogue photography. By bringing together hundreds of images of palm trees in a rigid grid, he pushes the tension between uniqueness and repetition, nature and culture, to its limits.
Filip Vervaet (b. 1977, BE) presents Paradiso IV, an imposing sculpture consisting of an assemblage of bronze casts of leaves from plants he found at Meise Botanic Garden. Beside the plant stands a mirror covered with a film also used in car customisation. Its colours shift as the viewer moves around the sculpture, further accentuating the plant’s artificial character.
Mira Sanders (b. 1973, BE) presents the scale model for her black-and-white short film The Voyage, alongside a number of related preparatory drawings. The model features a variety of characters and means of transport that evoke the wondrous world of travel, with a distinctly Jules Verne-like quality. For the film, Sanders used a handheld camera, occasionally zooming in on the model, further emphasising the idea of movement. The work is thus a homage to pre-cinema techniques, a fascination she shares with Marcel Broodthaers.
Lucian Moriyama (b. 1991, US) was born in Honolulu. His work explores how exoticism persists in both material and immaterial forms. One of his preferred media is scagliola, an old plaster technique used, among other things, to imitate marble. The material was frequently used for World’s Fairs and major construction projects, such as the Palace of Justice in Brussels, which would have been too expensive to build entirely in marble. The material embodies an unfulfilled promise of grandeur. Moriyama further heightens its trompe-l’œil quality.
In her watercolour drawings, Maya de Mondragon (b. 1987, FR) uses recurring elements such as hands or stars to evoke a dreamlike, ethereal universe imbued with a sense of wonder and poetic stillness. Body parts emerge only to disappear again, in a play of water, paint and chance. Repetition and variation reinforce the hypnotic quality of her work.
Myths and stories from the ancient Mediterranean world form the starting point for the paintings of Iasonas Kampanis (b. 1985, GR). His work explores the relationship between human and non-human beings, connecting with ancient animistic traditions. This diptych refers to Lethe and Mnemosyne, rivers of the underworld that symbolise forgetting and remembering. Although rooted in Mediterranean mythology, his work also evokes a Japonist influence, which itself had a major impact on Art Nouveau.
Yorgos Maraziotis (b. 1984, GR) created a new screen print especially for Un Jardin d’Hiver that could almost serve as a lexicon for the exhibition. He revisits a number of recurring themes and motifs—such as exotic animals, stained-glass constructions, colonial exploitation and bourgeois salon culture—creating a kind of visual atlas or synthesis of the exhibition.
Flea markets are the hunting ground of Catalan artist Oriol Vilanova (b. 1980, ES). They are also one of the reasons why he moved to Brussels in 2013. He regularly visits the flea market at Place du Jeu de Balle, one of the best-known flea markets in Europe, where postcards are among the objects he searches for. His collection comprises thousands of postcards, which he meticulously arranges according to fixed categories. For Vilanova, they are carriers of meaning that reveal recurring patterns and obsessions. For this exhibition, he presents a cardboard box packed so tightly with postcards that the viewer cannot properly look at them. The result is an almost imaginary collection. The banana box is used both for moving house and by vendors at the Place du Jeu de Balle flea market. The Chiquita banana silently bears witness to the way the exotic dream persists even in banal, everyday situations.
Che Go Eun (b. 1988, KR), meanwhile, explores different forms of image production, ranging from traditional Korean painting to video games, computer technology and AI. After feeding AI tools—which she initially considered too heavily dominated by Western influences —with examples of the Korean Dancheong style, she turned her attention to Art Nouveau. Using entries from her diary, she wrote prompts that were translated into Art Nouveau motifs, creating a visual translation of her emotions. Text by Sam Steverlynck, Brussels 2026
