Pierre Alechinsky, Belgium
Born in Brussels in 1927 and educated at the La Cambre school, Pierre Alechinsky is, in particular, one of the great figures of the Cobra movement.
Alechinsky's work is immense and world-famous. His work is marked by a strong relationship between writing and illustration, a dimension reinforced by the artist's attraction to Japanese calligraphy.
Among Alechinsky's many achievements are a number of prints from his early artistic career. He perfected his skills in Paris, where he settled in 1951, at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. The engravings presented in the À l’œuvre exhibition are taken from a book, dated 1948, which was repressed in the early 2000s.
Beverly BAKER - Latitude Artist, USA
American artist (Latitude Artist, Kentucky), Beverly Baker initially works from administrative documents that she pinches from her work place or from pages ripped out of magazines or books. This initial material is then covered with multiple layers of letters, words and lines of color.
Through regular visits to the workshops, Beverly Baker’s creations gradually cut loose from the text, becoming more graphic. The pieces exhibited here demonstrate this. We are confronted with art that is verging on tapestry and contrasts with the simplicity of the medium. As, regardless of the evolution of her work, Beverly Baker always turns to the same modest instruments: biros, pencils or marker pens.
Géraldine BEAUPèRE - Créahm Région wallonne, Belgium
A regular participant in the Créahm workshops for more than fifteen years, Géraldine Beaupère creates magnificent black and white reinterpretations of illustrated books. Both the text and images are subject to Géraldine Beaupère's copying and misappropriation.
The works exhibited here are from an older catalogue of creations, with the artist now focusing more on nature and its preservation.
Samuel Cariaux - Créahm Région Wallonne, Belgium - Atelier gravure du Trinkhall museum
Musician, Circassian artist, dancer and plastic artist, Samuel Cariaux is a “complete” artist who has regularly attended the Créahm workshops in Liège.
Strongly influenced by Japan - Samurai, calligraphy, sushi and Manga - Samuel Cariaux also draws his influence from the most sensual photography from adverts.
Since January 2023, Samuel Cariaux has taken up engraving at the Trinkhall. Some of these creations are on show here.
Martin Chaumont, Belgium
Martin Chaumont (1993 – …) is a painter and designer from Liège.
His work – landscapes with their buildings gradually removed – questions our relationship with nature. This concern leads to another: it is also the artist’s technical and sensitive rapport with his medium which is disturbed on each of his paintings and drawings.
Martin Chaumont received the Louise Dehem prize (Royal Academy of Belgium) in 2023.
Sylvain COSIJNS - De Bolster, Belgium
Sylvain Cosijns (1932-2020) entered the artistic workshop of the De Bolster center (Mariaheem, at the time) at the age of fifty-four. With the support of the leader, Jan Geldhof, Sylvain Cosijn’s artistic talent blossomed little by little. The artist maintained his own style: his characters became more and more stylized as he refined his lines.
Michel DAVE - La Pommeraie, Belgium
Michel Dave (1941-2018) joined the La Pommeraie workshops when he was fifty years old.
The artist traced out words as you would draw them, repeating the same word or the same sentence in multiple columns on the page – some of them surrounded by a kind of bubble or dotted line. For the most part, Michel Dave created his work using colored acrylic markers. Although they follow the same creative framework, the works exhibited here, differ in terms of the technique he used: engraving.
André DELVIGNE, Belgium
Represented by the Paul Duhem Foundation, visual artist and photographer, André Delvigne runs art therapy workshops.
The Bureau du boss is a pagan mausoleum that he built in honor of himself. It is a mishmash of drawings, equal part scraps and relics of happy or painful moments: wedding rings from failed marriages, a bullet which narrowly missed its target, a self-portrait, holy water, rosary beads, a tarot card and pocket watches which have long since ceased to tell the time.
Pierre De Peet - Créahmbxl, Belgium
Pierre De Peet (1929-2019) was one of the leading artists from the Créahm Brussels workshops, where he worked for almost thirty years from August 1990 until he passed away in November 2019.
Pierre DE PEET developed an overwhelmingly intense fine art body of work: drawings, paintings and etchings. Perfectly clear strokes, an intelligent use of colour, an innate sense of narration and an incomparable and outstanding use of poetry were the main elements of a pictorial form of language or expressionism, sometimes with the most tragic dimensions, which he continuously conversed with a kind of softness and tenderness never seen before.
Robert DE ZAEYTIDJT - Créahmbxl, Belgium
Robert De Zaeytijdt (1929-1999) fréquente les ateliers arts plastiques du Créahm à Bruxelles de 1984 à 1998. Sur une période relativement brève, il a réalisé une œuvre abstraite et puissamment poétique. L’artiste use de médiums privilégiés comme l’écoline et l’acrylique pour appliquer de larges aplats de couleur sur le papier. Ces zones sont toujours rehaussées d’une subtile ponctuation idéographique presque mathématique, à l’encre de chine ou au pastel, dont la graphie évoque les partitions musicales. S’il limite l’utilisation des couleurs jusqu’à l’épurement, Robert De Zaeytijdt est aussi un coloriste talentueux. De cette subtile combinaison surgit le doute, que l’artiste laisse planer sur ses intentions. L’interprétation n’en est que plus profonde et l’on peut imaginer de ces compositions qu’elles suggèrent un paysage ou un portrait. Ou bien sont-elles une forme d’expression calligraphique délicatement mystérieuse, dont le code aurait été gardé secret par l’artiste ?
Deux mondes se superposent, cohabitent et se complètent dans l’œuvre de Robert De Zaeytijdt : la brume d’une intimité et les accents de la vie qui racontent ses anicroches ou ses légèretés. Une création artistique qui nous renvoie définitivement à nos propres fragilités.
Michel DUPONT - Club André Baillon, Belgium
Michel Dupont (1945-2010) attended the plastic arts workshop of the Club André Baillon for several years.
Imbued with his knowledge of engineering, the artist drew his inspiration from electromechanical manuals, transfiguring diagrams and equations on large colored backgrounds.
Lynette Franklin - Corilong, Australia
For a little over ten years, Lynette Franklin participated in the Corilong Health Center creative workshop, in Victoria, Australia.
She mainly creates prints on which she then applies felt, acrylic or even collages. The small formats exhibited here most likely represent relatives of the artist.
Johan Geenens - Ateliers De Zandberg, Belgium
Born in 1970, Johan Geenens has regularly visited the De Zandberg workshops since 2002.
A member of the Wild Classical Music Ensemble, Johan Geenens is also, maybe above all, the creator of major plastic works and now enjoys wide recognition.
His work - etchings, drawings and paintings - seems to indicate great restraint, of course through its contents, but also through the choice of extremely simple, even frugal materials.
Jean-Marie Heyligen - Home André Livémont, Belgium
Jean-Marie Heyligen (Ath, Belgium, 1961) is a polymorphic artist: painter, etcher, sculptor. For over forty years, with endless patience he has played the role of saying everything that really matters in a way that is beyond words – stunned faces, abandoned and naked bodies, Indians from another world, knights from another time, all drawn into the irresolute enigma of shapes, strokes, materials, colours, images and things. The long-lasting theme of Jean-Marie Heyligen’s work is organised knick-knacks, constantly metamorphosing due to everything we secretly go through from childhood to adulthood.
After arriving at the Trinkhall Museum in 2002 as part of a monographic exhibition devoted to Jean-Marie Heyligen, the monumental sculpture is on show at the entrance and is now the guardian of the Museum.
Alexis Lippstreu - La Pommeraie, Belgium
With limited materials - pencil, paper - Alexis Lippstreu creates fantastic copies of the paintings of the masters. Gauguin’s, Manet’s or Velasquez’s scenes are reinterpreted, reinvented within infinite series. Each drawing is a variation on the main theme, endless, always taking over and adding more to the craft. Whether a reworking or a new page of the history of art, Alexis Lippstreu’s work cuts to the bone with great restraint and art consumed by starkness, revealing the heart of the most famous paintings.
The wonderful engravings on display here show this same creative device.
Ronny MacKenzie - Project Ability, UK
Ronny MacKenzie regularly attended the Project Ability artistic workshop (Glasgow) when he produced the piece showcased at the Trinkhall Museum. We currently have no information about this artist.
Doreen McPherson - Intoart, UK
Doreen McPherson’s work is created in black and white using graphite pencil and charcoal. Her works are reinterpretations of old photographs or afro hairstyles taken from magazines.
Doreen McPherson isolates the faces and makes them pop with her very masterful use of light and shade.
Alain Meert - Créahm Région Wallonne, Belgium
As an active participant of the Créahm Liège workshops since 1996, Alain Meert is a formidable painter of animals and an incredible copyist. Reproductions of animals or still life are transformed by his hands.
Alain Meert has also given the Trinkhall Museum one of his emblematic pieces: Le musée idéal (2019). A pirate ship installed in the heart of the museum, it carries within it the pieces but also the people and projects that are important to the artist. This piece presents itself as a metaphor of our museum policy.
Le musée idéal d’Alain Meert
The ideal museum is a work created throughout 2019 by one of the leading artists of the Créahm workshops, Alain Meert, in preparation for the opening of the Trink-Hall. The artist answered the question addressed to him - What is a museum? -by means of a sumptuous boat, all sails outside, where nonchalantly drawings, paintings and sculptures are exhibited. It is a theatre of papers, cardboards, objects, multiplied, unusual and familiar presences that fit exactly in between consciences. The whole world that fits in a boat: Alain Meert's ark. And it is a museum, as we want it to be, that navigates by dreaming among ideas, shapes and emotions. Captain (Navy), Alain Meert is a pirate. May we, at the Trink-Hall, let ourselves be led by its thousand ports and its ho ho ho!
Dan Miller - Creative Growth Art Center, USA
Active in the Creative Growth workshops in California, Dan Miller enjoys very wide recognition. His work is present, notably, in the collection of the MoMA, the Pompidou Center, the Lausanne Art Brut Collection and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Dan Miller is fascinated by hardware, light bulbs, electrical outlets and food and his pieces are composed of words and numbers relating to his passions. The terms are superimposed, intertwined, stretched or misappropriated, becoming the graphic elements of the plastic composition.
Bertha Otoya - Atelier Creativity Explored, USA
Born in Peru, Bertha Otoya regularly attends the American workshop, Creativity Explored. At first, she devoted herself to textile work, making tapestries and kilts according to traditional Peruvian methods. From 2009 onwards, her work took another path: at this point, Bertha Otoya turned her attention to painting, mostly in black and white. Gradually, engravings became a more important part of her creations: snakes, fish and mysterious creatures popped up on the front of manuscripts; copies of various works ranging from pacts with the devil to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Michel Petiniot - Créahm région wallonne, Belgium
Michel Petiniot (Liège, 1963) is now the dean of the Créahm, where he has regularly spent time since 1989. For over thirty years, from the start of his artistic career, he has deployed a graphic and pictorial universe based on Bruegel the Elder’s etchings and Van Gogh’s paintings. Not in terms of pattern or style, but through his strokes and endless repetition, the pure and simple emotion of drawing and painting. Since the dawn of time, Michel Petiniot has drawn in the style of etching; gathering strokes on paper, material, clay or whatever, he draws as if walking, pacing back and forth, free of the necessity of thinking, speaking or even fantasizing, secretly meditating, repeating and reinventing ad libitum – with such grace, rigor, modesty – his lines, imprints and marks. These are the works of the Honorable Michel Petiniot, the Chinese painter with an eccentric approach, without questions or answers, thwarting our poor habits and boring into our eyes like a dream about existing.
Louis Pons, France
Louis Pons was born in Marseille in 1927. Experiencing a certain degree of poverty and suffering from tuberculosis, Pons entered a sanatorium at the age of 21. He stayed there for more than a year. After that, he lived in the countryside.
Louis Pons never kept a job for long, whatever it was. He turned to artistic practice. He began with newspaper caricature, i.e. drawing. He made this choice out of sobriety (of finances) and freedom (of movement). Although Louis Pons learned his art far from academies or schools, Hercules Seghers, Rodolphe Bresdin, Louis Soutter and Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) were four artists who Louis Pons recognized as his masters.
During the 1960s, Louis Pons suffered from a major eye problem coupled with migraines. He was forced to abandon drawing, a practice requiring too much concentration and putting too much strain on his eyesight. Pons's drawings were then limited to the images adorned on envelopes or letters that he sent to his loved ones and which, very often, recounted the adventures of a bird or a rat called "Snop ".
Louis Pons went on to focus on assemblages. Perhaps it was in the artist's studio - established when his financial situation allowed him to settle in a permanent location - that the idea of assemblages was born: in Louis Pons’s studio – a joyous mess – things sat together and were assembled together; the artist helped along their reconciliation or their improbable union.
In 1972, Louis Pons's partner died. He moved to Paris the following year where he continued to devote himself to assemblage.
Louis Pons was represented by Le Point Cardinal gallery, then by the Claude Bernard gallery.
Piet SCHOPPING - Jans Pakhuys, Netherlands
Born in 1955 in Hilversum, Piet Schopping is the creator of the largely two-dimensional piece in black marker pen, pencil and acrylics. Writing is highly featured, recounting, from within the landscapes created by the artist, a story to which he alone holds the key.
Paola Sensi - La manica lunga, Italy
We currently have no information relating to this Italian artist.
Michael SMITH - Project Onward, USA
A regular attendee of the Project Onward workshop (Chicago, United States), the teenaged Michael Smith developed very personal plastic work. His first creations, with colored pencils, were inspired by women's and men's fashion magazines. Gradually, as the artist has aged, his work has veered more towards abstraction: the clear outlines of the beginning fade, the characters disappear and the features are sometimes barely suggested.
Pascal Tassini - CRÉAHM RÉGION WALLONNE, BELGIum
Pascal Tassini (Ans, 1955) spent time at the Créahm workshops for more than twenty years, from 1966 to 2018. He developed an extraordinarily rich polymorphous style – drawings, paintings, terra cotta sculptures and bunches of knotted material for which he is now famous, relentlessly cobbling together shapes, substances, existence. Among the many creations of Pascal Tassini: a cabin, emblem of his work. Built in the studio where he works, la Cabane is particularly important in the artist's creative process. It is made up of the very material that has given Pascal Tassini’s work its specificity – and reputation: recycled materials intertwined with each other using textile pieces knotted together. Placed in the heart of the workshop, la Cabane offers refuge to Tassini; it is the place where he is allowed to create and which houses completed works. It is so emblematic of his work that in 2017, when he exhibited at the Christian Berst Gallery in Paris, Pascal Tassini constantly revisited a large photographic reproduction of this extraordinary architectural achievement. La Cabane not only occupies a central place in the artist's work, but also represents a major piece in recent art history.
Luciano TREBINI - La Manica Lunga, Italy
Born in Carbonia in 1952, Luciano Trebini has been attending the La Manica Lunga workshop (Cremona, Italy) since 1998.
At first, he drew on small cards with a ballpoint or felt-tip pen. Subsequently, Luciano Trebini explored other avenues: he spread acrylic paint using a long-haired brush on a fairly large vertical support – often 70 by 100 centimeters. The artist rarely reproduces colors and favors black, which he combines with blue, red, brown, yellow or green.
Viviane VAN MELKEBEEKE - La Forestière, Belgium
Although Viviane Van Melkebeeke has been participating in La Forestière's activities since 1978, it was only in 1997, then aged nineteen, that she joined the institution's plastic arts workshop.
Viviane Van Melkebeeke's creations are entirely based on the act of writing. The artist uses all supports – loose leaf, notebooks, exercise books, diaries, drawing paper – and all writing instruments – pencil, ballpoint pen, marker or brush – to display a unique form of calligraphy, invented as her own personal alphabet .
LIONEL VINCHE, Belgium
Born in 1936, in Antoing, Lionel Vinche began his professional life as a sailor then as an actor and technician at the National Theater. Quickly, he devoted himself entirely to drawing and painting. He also created engravings and murals as well as theater sets.
Prolific, Lionel Vinche never quite stopped. He drew and painted on foundations found at random: shopping bags, packaging, pieces of wood or boxes gathered from here and there.
Benefiting from a certain notoriety in Belgium and elsewhere in the world, the work of Lionel Vinche does not yet enjoy wide recognition among the general public. Several initiatives are helping to reverse this trend: from fall 2025, a monographic exhibition will be dedicated to him on the ground floor of the Museum; the LRS52 gallery will also exhibit a selection of his works next year.
Pascale Vincke - Créahmbxl, Belgium
A workshop artist at the Créahm in Brussels, from 1986 to 1998, Pascale Vincke’s plastic art activity is mature, intense and brief. Her work largely consists of portraits inspired by magazine pages and adverts. Pascale Vincke uses her painting to twist and transform this glitzy and sparkly world; it breaks free of itself.
