19.September-02.November.2025
CLOSER
Carlos Caballero, Lena Marie Emrich
About the exhibition
CLOSER — A Duo Exhibition Featuring Works by Carlos Caballero & Lena Marie Emrich
Opening Friday 19 September 202517:00 — 21:00
Open
Saturday — Sunday
14:00 — 18:00
Opening hours during the
WONDER FESTIVAL
16.10 — 02.11.2025
Thursday — Friday
14:00 — 18:00
Saturday — Sunday
10:00 — 18:00
Opening hours during
KORTRIJK ART
24. — 25. — 26. October 2025
10:00 — 18:00
Artist Talk
Sunday 26 oktober 2025
At 11:00 : Els Wuyts in conversation with the artists Lena Marie Emrich en Carlos Caballer
‘CLOSER’ brings together two artists who each explore the tension between proximity and distance in a highly refined way. In this duo exhibition, Carlos Caballero (Cuba) and Lena Marie Emrich (Germany) present works that centre on intimacy, abstraction and the power of the unspoken. For Emrich, this marks her first exhibition in Belgium.
The title refers to Closer, the film by Mike Nichols, in which interpersonal relationships are in constant flux. Similarly, this exhibition renegotiates proximity and distance — visually, conceptually and emotionally. The works unfold between language and silence, between revelation and concealment.
Lena Marie Emrich (b. 1991, Göttingen, Germany) is a sculptor working between Belgium and Germany. Her practice moves fluidly between conceptual research and material precision, often merging sculptural form with fragmentary poetics. Emrich explores the social and aesthetic roles of rigid objects, subtly upgrading them through minimal but pointed interventions. Collaboration and a deep engagement with systems of value, protection, and presence are central to her work.
Her exhibitions include Import Export Gallery, Warsaw (2025), Office Impart, Berlin (2024), DS Gallery, Paris (2023), Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Kunstverein Göttingen, Kunstraum LLC, New York, and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
Her work is held in several public and private collections, including the Sprengel Museum, Burger Collection, Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation, ADAC Collection, and Marval Collection.
Carlos Caballero (° 1983, Camagüey, Cuba) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. His ‘silent’ oeuvre is like a fresh ripple of water, floating on the processing of nuances, details and compositional-spatial shifts, both in terms of color and motif. His paintings are usually of a small size; a format that allows him to work in a concentrated and precise manner. The images appear immaculate, almost geometrically exact and reveal very little tangible information. The viewer finds him- or herself in a thin dialogue with a visual language that remains cryptic-abstract. And yet, when putting your patience to the test, it becomes clear that the motifs in the paintings refer partly to typography and the suggestions of architectural details. Carlos Caballero’s paintings don’t ‘cry out’ this information; the use of softly and evenly applied acrylic paint brings peace and allows the (attentive) viewer to narrate the story.
The monochrome, flat paint lends itself perfectly to the sparse introduction of ‘elements’ that, independent of each other, start a ‘conversation’. One could describe this ‘living’ oeuvre, constant and slowly progressing, as a linear pictorial sequence.
His work is held in several public and private collections, including 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, US, Collection Flemish Community, S.M.A.K. (Museum Collection, Ghent), Belgium
About the location
Langs de Doornstraat, in een volledig nieuw ingerichte tentoonstellingsruimte, vlakbij Dejagere-Aerts Collection en Texture museum aan de Leie, opent Hilde Vandaele Gallery een tweede locatie. Terwijl haar eerste galerie voor hedendaagse kunst gelegen is in het kunstdorp Watou in de Westhoek, kiest ze voor deze nieuwe uitdaging de levendige stad Kortrijk als tweede uitvalsbasis.
