WAITING FOR THE SUN
EMILIE TERLINDEN

From 4 May to 22 June 2024, DMW Gallery presents the first solo exhibition by visual artist and painter Emilie Terlinden, Waiting for the Sun. In addition to a new series of oil paintings on canvas, Terlinden will show smaller works, as well as video and mixed media installations.

Her mysterious paintings emerge through a careful selection of images from the Renaissance and objects from her everyday environment. Though the images remain recognizable to the viewer as references to a specific era, a series of careful manipulations makes them entirely the artist’s own. 

Time is always an important factor in Terlinden’s process; the time that elapses between the different steps in the artistic process enhances the final effect of the artist’s works, in which the images used literally lose their time. The solo exhibition’s title is a nod to the specific process for her new series of still-lifes, one where she laboriously waited for the fleeting late autumn sun to shine its last rays through her windows and swathe her staged compositions in light.

Due to her studio’s north-east orientation and the tall buildings on the opposite side of the street, Terlinden only gets sunlight in the latter half of the day – in the colder months she is lucky if she gets any in the late afternoon. In the mornings she prepares her various compositions, folding, gluing and manipulating her cut-out reproductions of works by Rombouts, Veronese and De Vos, to then stage them next to her window.

When the sun finally filters through, casting shadows and overexposing parts of her composition, Terlinden snaps the picture that will serve as the basis of her work – before the light disappears.

The opening will take place on Saturday 4 May from 14:00–18:00, in the presence of the artist.