Artists

Michaël Borremans

Press release

David Zwirner is pleased to present French Painting, an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans. French Painting is the artist's ninth solo presentation with David Zwirner and his first at the Paris gallery, marking his first solo show in France in twenty years, following The Good Ingredients at La Maison Rouge–Fondation Antoine de Galbert in 2006. Recent institutional presentations include a retrospective of twenty years of painting, titled A Confrontation at the Zoo, at the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2024–25) and The Promise at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2024). French Painting is a subtly unfolding, ironic homage to the French pictorial tradition that delicately unsettles its legacy. Across the paintings in this exhibition, beauty emerges as both seductive and disturbing, suspended between tenderness and nihilism. While the show's title evokes a lineage of classical image-making by figures such as Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), and Édouard Manet (1832–1883), and a range of academic genres such as still life and portraiture, the paintings do not easily situate themselves within that heritage. Rather, they implicitly evoke a sensibility and way of image-making without ever fully settling within that history. Here, the practice of French painting is not celebrated outright, but subtly unsettled. In the portraits in French Painting, guilt and innocence coexist in a fragile state of unresolved duality; the figures are agents of disturbance and its consequence in a world wherein sentiment and estrangement coexist. Borremans's handling of his subjects eliminates distinctions between genres: the portrait in which identities dissolve becomes a still life, and the still life in which the subjects simmer with affective undercurrents becomes a portrait. In Magnolia Flowers and Magnolia Flowers II (2026), cuttings of magnolia branches in a ceramic pitcher embody a tension between nature and the human impulse to dominate and control, revealing a world in which beauty and destruction are intertwined. Beauty appears as something inherently ambiguous, at once seductive and disturbing. These objects evoke a fragile memory of purity and innocence, yet appear already aestheticized, absorbed into systems of value and display. The works here carry a distinct conceptual imprint yet remain deliberately ambiguous—understated and restrained but densely layered with references, notably to Chardin. As Borremans states, "despite their seemingly straightforward depictions, Chardin's works often transmit the auric vibrations from the world around the players, objects, and scenes of eighteenth-century France that he portrayed, which further reflect the artist's own taste, sensibility, and humor." With a distinct tension that has a haunting relevance in our time, Borremans engages in his work timeless human concerns: power, vulnerability, ambiguity, and identity, probing the instability of meaning itself. In paintings such as Boy with Bloody Arms and Lio sitters appear both as perpetrators and as victims, generating a tension within the image to which they are simultaneously subjected. In this way, they embody a fragile and unsettling condition: agents of disturbance and, at the same time, its consequence. The dissolving of genres, traditions, and painterly tropes in French Painting continues a decades-long inquiry of this nature, most recently presented in depth with A Confrontation at the Zoo, a retrospective of twenty years of painting presented at the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands, in 2024–25. In Happiness, an explosive device—the surface of which is seemingly cloaked in a lustrous pink insulated quilt—takes center stage. The imagery acquires a sarcastic charge, balancing between consumer culture and existential emptiness. In Phantom, a rocket emerges as a disruptive motif. Within this visual language, objects oscillate between threat and desire, technology and projection.