06 may 2025, Yves Joris
A flickering light: a female touch at Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche
Sometimes it's not the answer that matters, but how the question is asked, how it lingers in space, unspoken, like an unfinished sentence that hovers just beyond the reach of thought. When Sofie Van den Bussche curates an exhibition under the title a female touch, that’s precisely what happens: a cautious hypothesis is placed into the space. Not a forceful thesis, not an ideological pamphlet, but a suspicion that cannot be pinned down. In other words, a sensory invitation to artistic dialogue.
The stepping stone to a question
“I don’t want to make a statement,” says Van den Bussche halfway through the conversation. “I want to show. To reveal. To have people feel.”
The eight artists she has brought together for this group exhibition — Virginie Bailly, Ulrike Bolenz, Chantal Grard, Joanna Kraszewska, Dominique Romeyer, Mieke Teirlinck, Danielle van Zadelhoff and Cindy Wright — share no common style, generation or medium. What binds them is as elusive as the subject that connects them: the possible existence of a feminine touch in visual art.
Echos of Cixous
In the exhibition text, Els Wuyts references a question that has been circulating since the 1970s, when French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous introduced the concept of écriture féminine: a way of writing that is not linear, not rational, not patriarchal, but associative, sensual, physical. Writing from the skin, the voice, the breath. Not to place women in a separate category, but to give them the opportunity for a language that does not conform to existing norms.
Is that, Van den Bussche wonders, also perceptible in visual art? Can the difference be seen? Can it be sensed in the texture, heard in the silences between images?
It remains a risky endeavour, this search for that which must not be named without resorting to stereotypes. After all, just as not every woman makes feminine art, not every man makes masculine art. The artist is not a gendered mask, but a subject who thinks, suffers, observes and shapes. And yet, there is something there, something not immediately visible, but perhaps audible as a soft undercurrent in the interplay and mutual dialogue.
Joanna Kraszewska, Symmetrie (2), 2025, Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche
Theory rather than experience
The exhibition is held in a space that participates in the story itself. High ceilings, intimate corners, open expanses, places where the light fades or just begins to enter.
“I started with the light,” says Van den Bussche. “From the front, the sunlight, to the back, where it gets darker.” That transition is no coincidence. The works of art seem to adapt to a dramaturgy of light and shadow, openness and introspection, figuration and abstraction. The works weren’t selected for their similarities, but their differences. Not for what they have in common, but for their capacity for encounter. Each work speaks in its own pitch, with its own rhythm and breath. Sometimes it chafes, sometimes it glides. And sometimes it falls silent at exactly the right moment, only to fully reveal itself in the next.
Virginie Bailly, Rebel Rebel PO2, 2025, Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche
Intimacy as a keynote
The question of a so-called ‘feminine’ aesthetic remains dangerously slippery at times. What if the femininity in a work of art is primarily a projection of the viewer? What if it depends on cultural context, expectations, a collective desire for recognition? Still, there is something undeniable: a certain attention to the interior. To the relational, the porous, the sensory. Not uniformity, not clarity, but rather a shared sensitivity to what evades the surface. Not the loud, but the whispering. Not the conclusion, but the suggestion.
Could it be that what eludes logic is interpreted as feminine? And could it be that this sensitivity is not a trait of gender, but of the mind?
The encounter as composition
What makes this exhibition unique is the encounter, not only between work and viewer, but also among the artists themselves. They didn’t know each other beforehand and first met at the opening. And yet — or perhaps because of that — something unexpected has emerged. A recognition, a kinship. “There was a click,” says Van den Bussche. “An unexpected affinity.” No rivalry, no competition, but a shared field. No urge to prove themselves, but a sense of mutual connection. She describes it as a dialogue, not only between the works themselves, but also between the female artists: eight voices, eight personalities, eight paths that touch without merging. The differences in age, background and artistic approach only enhance the richness of this temporary community.
Ulrike Bolenz, Female Icarus floating, 2025, Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche
What remains
What lingers after a visit? Not necessarily an answer to the question of whether a female touch exists. But perhaps the experience of a space in which images do not shout, but wait. Where it pays to look slowly, to not immediately seek meaning, but to let presence trickle in.
One might ask: where does the vulnerability lie in this work and does that vulnerability also dare to be powerful? How does one piece relate to the other? As contrast, as echo, as a mirror? What happens to your gaze when you slow down with a texture, a line, a shadow that repeats itself in another medium?
The exhibition invites a mindful way of looking: not only at what a work shows, but at what it hides, what it suggests, what it evokes. Perhaps that is what these works share — not a thematic unity, but a shared invitation to intimacy with the image.
Els Wuyts ends her text on the website with the following:
“When you enter the gallery, can you feel the femininity? Does something like a female touch exist? What do you think?”
Maybe the answer is not yes or no. Maybe it’s a flicker in the light, a calm in the gaze, a hesitation in the voice. A touch — invisible, but palpable. Or more simply, perhaps the question itself is the work.
And you who are viewing the exhibition — what do you feel?
A female touch, Gallery Sofie Van den Bussche
