For Art Antwerp 2025, our selection brings together four artists who each combine a distinct visual language with a research-driven practice. Their work moves between material experimentation, poetic semiotics, graphic clarity, and layered painting. In dialogue, these artistic voices form a coherent and contemporary constellation that reflects the complexity of our surroundings.

Kaspar Dejong explores the human impulse to leave traces. Drawing on his background in graffiti and his ongoing study of the shifting urban landscape, he approaches public space as a field of interaction. Monochrome paintings are interrupted by coloured signs that hover between presence and erasure. Using spray paint, graphite, oil, and acrylic, he suppresses, overwrites, and reframes these marks. Installations composed of found materials emphasise his psychogeographic approach: wandering through the city guided by attraction and resistance, allowing new meanings to emerge.

Ruben Raven moves in his paintings, collages, and sculptural objects between abstraction and recognisable form. His work is grounded in impressions of the urban environment and plays with layering, material traces, and graphic gestures. The resulting compositions balance on the threshold between structure and dissolution. Raven invites viewers to re-examine familiar shapes—shifted, detached from their context, and reassembled into a visual language that captures the rhythm of the contemporary city.

Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx investigates how identity takes shape in an era where the physical and digital constantly overlap. He combines drawing, found objects, and imagery from online communities to question originality, authorship, and self-representation. Self-portraits, app-generated images, and delicate installations reflect on memory, time, and the shifting boundaries between human and artificial creation. His recent work focuses on impermanence and transformation, inspired by the emergence and dissolution of AI-driven image-making.

Anouk Van Offenwert begins with an intuitive trust in the hand as an autonomous agent. In her drawings and paintings, she explores how meaning arises before language—where line, movement, and matter open a shared, pre-verbal sensibility. Ink, handmade pigments, and canvas act as conversational partners: each gesture responds to how the material behaves, resists, or yields. On large, often unprimed canvases, she creates a terrain where the sensory, intuitive, and cognitive intertwine. Natural structures, growth patterns, and atmospheric shifts appear as signs that resist fixation, generating an open space for meaning.

Together, these four artists show how contemporary visual language can grow from movement, encounter, and material—and how art can offer new ways of looking at our environment and ourselves.
With support from the Mondriaan Fund