David Zwirner is pleased to announce The Monkey, an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, taking place at the gallery’s London location. In these works, Borremans continues to explore surface and artifice in his careful consideration of mise-en-scène, combining technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation to create works that are simultaneously humorous and unnerving, familiar and enigmatic. This will be Borremans’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery and his second at David Zwirner London.
The title of the exhibition is taken from several new portrait paintings that depict the eponymousprimate, who is shown in these works from the shoulders up, adorned in blue and gold regalia. The portraits invoke The Monkey Painter (1739/1740) by the great eighteenth-century French painter JeanSiméon Chardin, showing a simian in painter’s garb at work on a canvas. Borremans’s monkey, as the artist noted in a recent interview with director Luca Guadagnino, “is a self-portrait” but “not just a self-portrait.” Rather, the artist said, “It’s a universal version of the portrait of the painter, the figure of the artist.”
While Chardin’s famous work appears to have been based on an actual monkey, the dull gaze and softly blurred and glossy features of Borremans’s monkey reveals that the subject of his portraits is not a live animal but a small, glazed sculptural figurine. Borremans created these works by meticulous application of layer upon layer of translucent oil paint, giving the monkeys a quality of timelessness and depth that parallels the sculptural nature of the shiny figurine. At the same time, cast within the format and traditional associations of the portraiture genre, the monkey appears discomfitingly sentient. Reflecting on these qualities in a recent essay that will appear in a new publication by David Zwirner Books, writer Katya Tylevich notes: “The artist loves a dry laugh mixed with the somber medium of oil on canvas. In The Monkey, however, the joke comes wrapped in razor blades. This body of work feels sharp and dangerous. The laugh more acidic.”
Another work, also titled The Monkey (2023) but portraying a young man in three-quarter profile gazing out toward the frame, reinforces the fluid, conceptual, and ambiguous nature of these paintings. Like the monkey figurine, his hard, round helmet reflects gleaming light off its smooth surface, complicating any literal reading of the human subjects as animate and the monkey sculptures as inanimate. In several other portraits of human figures, Borremans paints his subjects in costumes that have appeared in previous bodies of works—lustrous hooded puffer jackets, which seemingly place them in our present day, or in the future, though little is revealed about the setting in which they are shown.
The works’ titles—such as The Talent (2023) and The Talent II (2023)—connect the portrayed subjects to certain historical archetypes, yet their appearances resist clear narratives. In these two related paintings, Borremans presents a figure from the torso up, clad in generic cowboy and Western attire that the artist sourced from Hollywood studios during a recent trip to Los Angeles. If Borremans gives his monkey anuncanny alertness, the cowboy outfit “makes his human model into a figurine.”3 As Tylevich further observes, “Borremans creates an imbalance between viewer and subject. He muddies the presupposed allegory of the human figure. Representations of our own image often evoke empathy. But Borreman makes us question whether his images feel anything for us in return.”
Complementing the portraits are a group of small-format panel paintings of landscapes that likewise build on the motifs and ambiguities of similar works from The Acrobat, the artist’s closely related 2022 solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Though the portraits and landscapes directly engage and subvert their respective genres, Borremans also sees them as linked: “A portrait of mine can be perceived as a landscape because it also appeals to the subconscious,” states the artist. “The work is never literal, it can never be perceived that way. It’s more emotional.” 5 In these landscapes, Borremans uses scale as a tool of mystification that unsettles the relationships and hierarchies between subjects and objects. The Gardener (2023) shows a forested tableaux with the monkey figurine making a reappearance at a size that dwarfs a vitrine-like structure and several human figures below. The Smell and The Smell II (both 2023) include enlarged Cadillac hood ornaments that appear massive compared to the miniaturized cars and reclining humans in the middle and foreground. Here, as in the portraits, Borremans sets the literal and figurative stage, allowing unseen and unspoken tensions to simmer beneath the surface of his works, drawing the viewer into them.
The Monkey follows the April 2024 opening of Borremans’s solo exhibition The Promise at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, as well as The Acrobat—a show much lauded by critics including John Vincler of the New York Times, who stated that Borremans “may be the greatest living figurative painter.”
