PIETER VERMEERSCH

Perrotin is pleased to present the ninth solo exhibition by the Belgian artist Pieter Vermeersch, in Dubai.

September 30–November 22, 2026

In the creative realm of Pieter Vermeersch, there is space and time for slowness, attention, and meditation on human and more-than-human relations. His works move fluidly between painting, architectural elements, and geological ready-mades. Encountering an artwork is always an experiential phenomenon; Vermeersch, however, is especially interested in the viewer’s self-reflexive observation of the interplay between the recognizable and the abstract.

Each work is an archive of artistic processes and protocols that run alongside one another, producing a creative tension between a controlled framework and a free flow of occurrences. His paintings appear in their most reduced form: color passes imperceptibly into another color; at first glance, the surface is emptied of gesture, narration, and any recognizable subject. He begins by taking photographs without spatial references, turning them upside down and transforming them into negative images on canvas. Paintings thus emerge from a process in which the artist deliberately avoids defining a spatial or temporal framework.

Vermeersch’s work begins where the distinction between image and matter, between the visible and the conditions of its appearance, becomes unstable. What happens when the supposedly passive surface refuses to remain passive? What happens when color, pigment, stone, light, and architecture are no longer understood as instruments awaiting the agency of an artist or spectator, but as forces participating in the formation of the work? Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materiality, set out in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), offers a productive argument here: matter does not merely receive human intention but also acts, affects, and modifies the situations in which it participates.

Pieter Vermeersch’s first exhibition in the United Arab Emirates comprises eleven recent and earlier works, in which the exhibition space itself becomes a stage for human and more-than-human interactions. Walls painted in various shades of gray carry a subtle scenography that lets visitors move through the space in an open choreography, immersing themselves in works placed in careful relation to one another.