Zones de lumière, zones d’ombres

Opening: Saturday, 12 September 2026, 2–5pm
Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation
Chaussée de Gand 1118, 1082 Brussels

Zones de lumière, zones d’ombre brings together the work of Rosa Barba, Rossella Biscotti, Kasper Bosmans, Gabriel Kuri and Felipe Mujica in dialogue with Walter Leblanc, marking the fortieth anniversary of the artist’s passing. The exhibition starts from a simple invitation: each guest artist was asked to select a work from the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation’s collection and to develop a response from that encounter. Each choice reflects a different kind of affinity — formal, conceptual, material, or intuitive — becoming the point of departure for a dialogue with a newly commissioned or existing work.

The resulting exhibition unfolds through a multiplicity of perspectives. It brings renewed attention to works that have remained at the margins of established narratives, including a singular abstract drawing whose exceptional character resists easy classification. Other interventions connect works from different moments in Leblanc’s career, while one project reactivates an original engraving plate more than sixty years after its first use, extending both its material history and its capacity to produce new images. Rather than illustrating Walter Leblanc’s oeuvre, each artistic proposition opens a distinct path through it, revealing overlooked aspects, unexpected resonances, and alternative readings.

Together, these individual dialogues construct an open and experimental field rather than a unified interpretation. Different artistic languages, temporalities, and sensibilities coexist without seeking synthesis. The exhibition becomes a space of productive tension, where contemporary practices do not simply respond to Walter Leblanc’s work but test it, expand it, and allow it to resonate in relation to the present. The field of action is therefore not only the exhibition space itself, but also the network of relationships that unfolds between the collection, the invited artists, the archive, and the public.

The exhibition takes its title from a handwritten note by Walter Leblanc found during the ongoing study of his archive. The complete sentence reads: Zones de lumière, zones d’ombre: champ d’action en perpétuelle tension. This phrase surfaced only after the participating artists had already been invited and the conceptual framework of the exhibition had taken shape. Yet Leblanc’s words came to name what had already begun to emerge through the project. The second part of the sentence — a field of action in perpetual tension — reaffirms a curatorial approach: that of conceiving the exhibition as a space nourished by encounters, frictions and the continuous generation of intellectual and unexpected associations.

The discovery of this phrase was made possible through more than two years of archival research involving the digitisation, classification, and close analysis of thousands of documents, notebooks, photographs, correspondence, and unpublished materials. This long-term undertaking has been carried out through the collective efforts of archivists, researchers, students, and partner institutions, notably CKV, whose work has transformed the archive into an active space of research, dialogue, and exchange.

This exhibition also reflects the Foundation’s broader vision. While preservation remains fundamental to its mission, the archive is understood not only as a collection to be safeguarded but as a place from where artistic propositions can emerge. Through long-term collaborations with artists, researchers, and institutions, it becomes a site where knowledge is produced and relationships are formed. Each invited artist enters this ongoing history, offering another perspective through which Walter and Nicole Leblanc’s legacy can be interpreted, extended, and projected into the future. In this sense, Zones de lumière, zones d’ombre is not conceived simply as a commemoration, but as another chapter in a living history — one in which the archive remains an active resource and each collaboration becomes part of the Foundation’s own evolving story.

About Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba (1972) engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach that explores light, transparency and reflection. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.

Recent solo presentations include: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2026); MoMA, New York, USA (2025); MAXXI, Rome (2025), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2024); Tate Modern, London (2023); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021).

About Rossella Biscotti

Rossella Biscotti (1978) has created an art of investigation and research which places questions of collective interest at the centre of her work. Though early on in her career Biscotti focused on the structural amnesia marking recent history, her latest works look at resources, raw material extraction, process and circulations and how nature politics, economy and gender intersect in complex narratives. Biscotti combines research with the powerful agency of sculptural forms and vibrant matter to create work with suggestive power and forensic precision.

Recent solo presentations include: Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2024); Fabra i Coats, Barcelona, Spain (2023); Stadtgalerie Zwergelgartenpavillon, Salzburg, Austria (2021); Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2019); WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2014).

About Kasper Bosmans

Kasper Bosmans (1990) is known for multifaceted and divergent approaches to art-making, with works that range from sculpture and installation to painting and drawing. His practice is a complex concoction of high art and literature, popular culture, mythology, and anthropology viewed through a queer and playfully minimalist lens that subversively observes and reinvents narratives that dominate the world around us.  

Recent solo presentations include: Kohta, Helsinki, Finland (2026); De Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2023 & 2021); Delvaux, Paris, France (2023); WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2022); S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium (2016).

About Gabriel Kuri

Gabriel Kuri (1970) focuses on objects and spaces that mediate human relationships to explore the untapped potential for transformation in the everyday. Engaging the principles of minimalism and capitalist consumption, he integrates elements of the familiar in his collages and sculptures. Kuri questions the given tenets of contemporary culture through poetic juxtapositions and hybrid objects that rethink the mundane and present the eloquence and extraordinary in daily life. 

Recent solo presentations include: Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico (2023); Aranya Art Centre, Beidaihe, China (2023); WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2019); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2020).

About Felipe Mujica

Felipe Mujica’s (1974) practice spans the fields of art, architecture, design, education and collective organisation. Collaboration, exchange and the social dimension of art are always key principles underpinning his work. He creates works comprising of installation, drawing, collapsible sculptures and printmaking, influenced by modernism and the international artistic, social and political movements in the late 60’s and 70’s.  

Recent presentations include: Melly Kunstinstituut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2026); Beam Editions & Proyectos Ultravioleta at Primary, Nottingham, UK (2025); Industriemuseum, Ghent, Belgium (2024); OSMOS Address, New York, USA (2023); La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2022); Museo de Artes Visuales UC, Santiago, Chile (2022); and Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA (2021).