Stief Desmet: Solo Exhibition

MPV Gallery is pleased to announce the new solo exhibition by Belgian artist Stief Desmet (1973, BE). Starting May 9, the gallery will present a selection of recent paintings and sculptures - works that reflect an artistic practice in constant flux, effortlessly crossing boundaries between media.

Stief Desmet investigates the complex interplay between nature and culture. How does humanity manipulate nature, and how does nature turn that manipulation back on us?

Desmet grew up in the Leie region of East Flanders, Belgium, in a landscape that has shaped generations of Flemish painters. After journeys through Asia, Canada, and Los Angeles, he returned to Deinze, where he lives and works on a former pig farm converted into a complex of studios and living spaces. He has fully absorbed the lesson of regional peers Roger Raveel and Raoul De Keyser: a universal body of work can be built from a provincial town, provided one looks deeply enough at what is close at hand.

His practice moves perpetually between two worlds: the hectic, consumption-driven society he inhabits and a deep longing for a utopian natural state. From this tension he produces paintings, bronze and concrete sculptures, ceramics, screen prints, and performances. He does not consider himself a painter or sculptor in the strict sense, he searches, he gleans, he assembles.

As a point of departure, he recuperates iconic images from our collective memory and combines them with botanical elements found in his immediate surroundings and industrially fabricated building materials. Objects ripen in the studio, sometimes for months, before finding their definitive place in a work.

Nature in Desmet’s work is never an idyllic backdrop but an active interlocutor. Freezing the transient, preserving the fragile - these are among the central driving forces of his practice. A dead branch in the forest disappears in months; cast in bronze, it remains forever that same branch. His sculptures are explicitly designed to weather: sea salt, rain, the hands of passers-by all complete the work. Nature always has the final word.

Set against this is culture in all its layered complexity. Greek mythology and art history are indispensable tools for Desmet, anchoring his work in a millennia-long conversation about the relationship between humanity, nature, and the cosmos; a conversation he does not resolve but keeps alive, holding tradition and innovation, beauty and destruction, in deliberate tension.

Desmet has exhibited worldwide. His work is held in national and international collections and in the public realm.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​