The work of contextual artist Pierre Mertens (Antwerp, °1953) questions a society that strives for perfection and prefers to avoid suffering.
This theme touched him personally, through Liesje, his first child, who was born with a severe congenital defect.
Mertens’ oeuvre uniquely brings together his role as a visual artist with his work as a group therapist and his activism for the right to life for children with disabilities, both here and in the global South.
He painted himself into prominence in the early 1990s, through his recurring pattern of interwoven nude figures. His work fell off the classical canvas, as it were, and he applied the pattern to objects and buildings. Thus, he painted a picture of a humanity that, driven by its primitive self, consumed and destroyed the world. The individual ‘I’ threatened to dissolve into a swirling mass.
But over time, Mertens noticed that the public only saw the pattern, losing his message. This led him to focus on social art projects with homeless people, asylum seekers, unemployed migrants, prisoners and children with disabilities. In these projects, he used materials and symbols that were specifically meaningful in their context.
At the Interaction Academy, he will show a selection of paintings that he has continued to make over the past 30 years, but which have not been on display before.
These hidden works on canvas build on his earlier pattern, although the nude figures and style have changed over the years.
Pierre Mertens at the Interaction Academy,
Van Schoonbekestraat 33, 2018 Antwerp
The exhibition runs until 5 September 2025.
Please notify secretariaat@iaac.eu if you want to visit. Please note that the building is unfortunately not wheelchair-accessible.
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