Some places contradict your expectations the moment you turn in through the gate, and Verbeke Foundation in Kemzeke is one of them. Twelve hectares of pasture, old farm and industrial buildings, and scattered between them, art that couldn't care less about the usual white cube. We went this summer with a modest plan, an afternoon's walk, and came out again at dusk, heads full of thread, paper and concrete. Few places make the case for Belgian modernism this convincingly, or this quietly.

Soft Architecture: The Power of Textile

What caught us first was a small, carefully considered presentation of textile art: work by Lieva Bostoen, Corine Toussein and Veerle Dupont, three women who in the 1970s lifted weaving into something far removed from the decorative wall hanging. Bostoen (b. 1935) moved from knotting into weaving after discovering the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, and built, on a self-made loom, open, organic compositions in flax, wool, cotton, sisal and jute, sculptures rather than tapestries. Toussein (b. 1942, Bruges) is self-taught, working her way from embroidery through crochet to rug-knotting, with the circle as a recurring form in wool reliefs of a quiet, poetic intensity; her work travelled to the World's Fair in San Francisco, to Cologne, Münster, Lodz and Warsaw, and in 1978 was given a major retrospective, fittingly, in Turnhout. Dupont (b. 1942) pushed material experimentation furthest of all: wool, artificial silk, plastic, reed and wood, woven haute-lisse into wall reliefs that seem to grow between the stretched threads like wild vegetation, cords she dyed herself or dipped in tar. Her monumental piece for the 1977 Ghent manifestation (300 x 750 cm) was later rebuilt in Sion, Charleroi, Brussels and Stuttgart. For us it felt like uncovering a whole, long-underappreciated generation: textile as autonomous, sculptural art, unmoored from craft, and still, remarkably, undervalued.

Assembling a Movement

From there we walked into the permanent collection, housed in the building devoted to collages and assemblages, some six thousand twentieth-century works, and exactly the kind of collection that makes us, as a gallery, go quiet. Guy Mees (1935–2003) hangs there with his early, relief-like charcoal paintings and his later aluminium work; in 1960 he signed the manifesto of the Nieuwe Vlaamse School alongside Broodthaers and Panamarenko, making him one of the key figures of Antwerp's postwar avant-garde. Vic Gentils (1919–1997) is represented with assemblages of fused gramophone records, piano keys and charred wood, he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and at Documenta III. And then Kurt Lewy (1898–1963), a name too few people know: a German-Belgian Jewish artist, trained under Kurt Schwitters among others, who fled to Brussels in 1935 and, after the war, developed a soft, geometric abstraction within the Art Abstrait circle. Among these names hang collages by André Bogaert too, and, a reminder that this collection is still growing today, work by Jan Fabre and Luc Deleu. 

Standing in that room, it's hard not to think of it as the blueprint from which everything we love about Belgian design descends: rigour, material honesty, a refusal to follow Paris or New York.

Monumental Control in the Open Air

But we saved the best for last: the garden. Among the trees and pastures stands sculpture that is uncompromisingly modernist, and that somehow reads even more convincingly outdoors than it would between four walls. Mark Verstockt (1930–2014), who built his entire oeuvre around the square, moving from lyrical abstraction through constructivism to minimalism, is there with his strict, monochrome geometry. Hilde Van Sumere (1932–2013), one of the most important representatives of Belgian constructivism, shows circles and squares in arduin stone, bronze and Carrara marble, a material she only truly mastered after a trip to the quarries of Carrara. And Pol Spilliaert, whose work we wrote about earlier in connection with pieces from his artist's residence in Sint-Kruis, that 1968 modernist house by architect Rik Scherpereel that so perfectly captures the synergy of architecture, nature and art, stands here, quite literally, in his natural habitat. Three sculptors, three completely different vocabularies, and yet the same conviction: that geometry, placed outdoors, becomes something closer to architecture than to decoration.

An Eye for the Overlooked

That, in the end, is why Verbeke Foundation moves us so much: it's exactly the place where our own love for Belgian modernism finds its confirmation. Not the big, well-known names from the textbooks, but the weavers, assemblage artists and sculptors who spent decades building their own, unpolished, idiosyncratic language, often on a farm in Kemzeke, far from Brussels or Antwerp. It's this overlooked corner of Belgian art history, still far more affordable than its French or American postwar equivalents, that we spend most of our time chasing: a Bostoen wall relief found in a Bruges attic, a maquette by Verstockt that never made it into a public collection, a Van Sumere study in plaster nobody thought to keep. If a name from this story ever turns up in your own family's collection, or catches your eye at an estate sale, it's worth a closer look before it disappears again.

If a piece like these speaks to you: a Mark Verstockt currently sits in our own collection, browse it in the Maison Moderniste catalog. Works by Van Sumere, Bostoen or Toussein are exactly the kind of finds we're always chasing on behalf of collectors who share this fascination, and our last Pol Spilliaert recently found a new home in Paris, proof that this corner of Belgian modernism doesn't stay overlooked for long. Get in touch to arrange a private viewing at the gallery in Turnhout, or let us know what you're hunting for.

→  Mark Verstockt in the Maison Moderniste Collection