Bert Mertens - The Places Speak to Us. An Art That Calls Out the Beauty of Banality
- exhibition
-
guided tour
Looking is a way of being in the world. But what if we really looked? The places speak to us... This is what Bert Mertens' pictorial art makes us aware of. Born in Louvain (Belgium) in 1955, Bert Mertens began his artistic career in 2018 with oil painting, after a professional life in the medical field. Self-taught, he produces meticulously realistic paintings, executed by hand, without technological assistance.
From the precisely rendered visible, he reveals complexity, brilliance, or humor that we might otherwise overlook. He invites us to discover the unusual within the familiar, the depth beneath the surface, the being beneath the appearance. Bert Mertens focuses on human experience and guides our gaze where we wouldn't go spontaneously.
An old cluttered garage, a disorderly construction site, an illegal dump: he observes the density of life, the poetry of light, color, lines, and shapes. Winner of the 2024 Jos Albert Prize from the Royal Academy of Belgium (Arts Class), his meticulous realism allows him to step away from the spectacular and rediscover the autonomy of interpretation, admiring the forgotten beauty of daily life.
Bert Mertens especially reveals the genius and tenderness of places where human work happens.
Good to know
Guided tour in French by Myriam Watthée-Delmotte, FNRS research director and professor emeritus at UCL Louvain, in the presence of the artist.
Elvire Geiben will welcome the Friends of Museums for this tour.
Places still available at 3:30pm (waiting list at 2:30pm).
Automatically translated from French.
Where does it take place?
National Art & History Museum
Luxembourg
by 
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