Cultural Compass: Architecture Day, a new view on porcelain and masterworks from Leon Spilliaert

Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: Flanders opens the doors to some of its most interesting spaces, an iconic porcelain artist shifts colour and perspective and Leon Spilliaert decorates the walls of the Patrick Dermon Gallery in Brussels.

Architecture Day, 7 June, Various locations

Architecture is often admired from the outside. On Architecture Day, visitors are invited to step inside. Across Flanders and Brussels, twenty of the region’s most acclaimed recent architectural projects will open their doors, offering a rare opportunity to experience the spaces that are shaping contemporary life, work and culture.

Selected from the nominees for the Flanders Architecture Prize, the projects range from homes and workplaces to educational, care and community spaces. Together, they showcase how architecture can respond to some of today’s most pressing challenges, from sustainability and urban density to heritage preservation and social inclusion.

Among the highlights is BRUSK in Bruges, the city’s striking new art hall. Designed as a light-filled cultural hub, its soaring exhibition spaces, inspired by artists’ studios, create a dramatic setting for contemporary art.

In Brussels, visitors can discover the Goujons Tower, the region’s largest residential building, where an ambitious renovation was carried out while residents remained in their homes. Meanwhile, in Hasselt, the historic Beguinage has been transformed into a vibrant green campus for the Faculty of Architecture, breathing new life into a centuries-old site.

Beyond the buildings themselves, Architecture Day offers a chance to hear the stories behind the designs, meet architects and users, and gain insight into how thoughtful architecture can shape everyday life. It is an invitation to look beyond façades and discover the ideas, ambitions and human experiences that bring these spaces to life.

Stockmanszwart, until 29 August, Studio Pieter Stockmans, Genk

For more than six decades, Belgian porcelain artist Piet Stockmans has been inseparable from a single colour: the luminous, almost translucent blue that became his signature. Now, at the age of 85, he is turning to black.

The new body of work, presented at his studio in Genk, marks a striking departure for an artist whose career has been defined by the pursuit of lightness and clarity. Yet the shift is deeply personal. Earlier this year, Stockmans lost his wife, while his own cancer has spread throughout his body. “I always show what is happening in my life in my work,” he says. “Right now, that is grief.”

Rather than retreating, Stockmans has continued to create with renewed urgency. “Perhaps I may create my most beautiful works now,” he reflects. “It would be a shame if I no longer did that.”

The resulting works are among the most intimate of his long career. Their dark surfaces conceal layers of meaning: within the abstract forms emerge hints of faces, trees and burdens carried through a lifetime.

The exhibition also revisits themes that have shaped Stockmans’ entire career. Long before contemporary ceramics gained widespread recognition, he challenged the notion that porcelain was merely decorative. Over decades, he helped elevate the medium into the realm of contemporary art, combining craftsmanship with conceptual depth.

Leon Spilliaert: Through Half-Open Doors, until 14 August, Patrick Dermon Gallery, Brussels

A room, a seashell, a pair of gloves left behind: in the hands of Belgian artist Leon Spilliaert (Ostend 1881 – Brussels 1946), even the most ordinary objects seem to acquire a mysterious inner life. This new exhibition brings together around 40 masterworks devoted to the artist’s interiors and still lifes, offering a rare glimpse into one of the most introspective corners of his oeuvre.

Although often linked to Symbolism, Spilliaert was a singular figure who resisted artistic labels. Rather than depicting grand allegories, he turned his attention to the spaces and objects around him, transforming everyday reality into something quietly uncanny. His empty rooms, libraries, conservatories and piano corners are devoid of human presence, yet charged with atmosphere. Silence appears almost tangible.

Many of the works date from a period of illness around 1909, when Spilliaert found inspiration in the objects that surrounded his sickbed. Bottles, flasks, teapots and shells become the protagonists of pared-back compositions in which light, shadow and perspective subtly alter perception. Familiar objects seem to shed their practical function and reveal unexpected meanings.

Working with fluid ink washes and delicate touches of colour, Spilliaert stripped forms down to their essence. The result is art that hovers between reality and dream, anticipation and memory.

​​(MOH)

_{​#FlandersNewsService | Architecture Day © PHOTO DIETER DANIËLS}

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