Bart Gielen: Timeless Weight

Between image and object.

Bart Gielen – Drawing & Ceramics

Bart Gielen , born in 1983 in Belgium, lives and works in Kanegem. His practice moves between drawing and ceramics, often collapsing the distinction between image and object. What appears at first as a historical residue or a fragment from another time gradually reveals itself as a contemporary position grounded in hesitation, weight and ambiguity. Gielen’s works do not aim for immediacy. They ask for duration.

“I want my work to be timeless and elusive” Bart Gielen

Central to his practice is the tension between familiarity and unease. Gielen works with existing imagery, drawn from art history, media sources and personal archives, yet never treats these references as quotations. Through distortion, framing and material intervention, he shifts their emotional register. Ceramic frames, supports and vessels are not neutral carriers but active components that thicken the image, adding physical resistance and presence. Light and shadow are handled with restraint, producing depth without spectacle.

Gielen’s work operates in a zone of quiet friction. His images hover between protection and threat, intimacy and distance, stillness and latent movement. Rather than offering narrative clarity, they remain open, holding contradictory states at once.

This refusal of resolution positions his practice within a contemporary context that values ambiguity as a condition, not a problem, and material sensitivity as a form of though

Bart Gielen on Instagram

Bart Gielen - Artworks and Exhibition Views:

Bart Gielen(left) Starboy’ (2025) - Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 40 x 28 x 4 cm - Image Courtesy of the Artist - (right) ‘Residence’ (2025) - Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 32 x 23 x 9 cm - Image Courtesy of the Artist

Bart Gielen : Exhibition View Unframed Gallery - Image Courtesy of the Artist and gallery

Bart Gielen: (left). ‘I am carnal #1’ (2025) Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 27 x 25 x 7 cm - Image Courtesy of the Artist (right) ‘Worship’ (2024) Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 31 x 21 x 10 cm - Image Courtesy of the Artist

Bart Gielen: ‘Prologue’ (2025) Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 22 x 30 x 4 cm - Image Courtesy of the ArtistBart Gielen: ‘The Devil in his Youth’ (2025) Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 23 x 14 x 4 cm - Image Courtesy of the Artist

Bart Gielen: ‘Hollow Jesus on a strawl’ (2024-2025) Charcoal/Pastel/Ceramics - 63 x 38 x 4 cm (right) ‘Ten Interventions that could be Divine #5’ (2024-2025) Charcoal/Ceramics - 25 x 18 x 5 cm

Bart Gielen: ‘Landscape II’ (2023-2024) Charcoal/Pastel/Wooden Panel - 90 x 120 cmBart Gielen: Bart Gielen: Exhibition Installation, artist in front of work ‘The Deal’ Charcoal on paper - 3 x 2 m - Image Courtesy of Wouter Willaert

More Artists - featured

Ruo-Hsin Wu paints faceless figures suspended in pitch-black voids. Taiwan-based, technically luminous, emotionally weightless. Kristof Santy and the Quiet Power of Everyday Painting

Exhibition

Paulina Olowska, Caroline Walker and Adéla Janská at Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc. A spatial exhibition on painting, labour and visibility.