Guest artists spring 2025

Christina has always had a fascination with faces and drawing them, looking for the soul and expression in the eyes.

Her current job brings her into frequent contact with people from other origins. People of African, Oriental and Latin origins. People with courageous stories. Hence the idea to create a new series of African portraits with acrylic and pencil. The combination of cobalt blue and black, the playing effect between light and shadow and the details make them look almost realistic photos.

Christina, together with her husband, sculptor Alain Lodewijckx, exhibited from March 6 to 16, 2025.

Welcome to the vibrant and unique world of Stéphanie Maillart's paintings, where art and music come together. She paints (on) music.
As an artist with synesthesia, she is blessed with the extraordinary ability to see and interpret sounds as colors, shapes, and textures.
The abstract paintings show a small fragment of her vision of the chosen melody that plays in a loop in her studio.
Her painted portraits are based on a different concept: they are inspired by the lyrics and reflect her perception of the person portrayed by the singer.

Born in Brussels in 1974, her amazing adventure began at the age of 17 when she won a prize in California for the best painted sets of several musicals and plays, including West Side Story and The Comedy of Errors. This led her to find her calling as an artist.
Today, her paintings are appreciated by art collectors all over the world.

“A painting is music you can see, and music is a painting you can hear.” Miles Davis.

Stéphanie will exhibit from Wednesday April 23 until Sunday May 4, 2025.

Bert Prins wants to please the viewer with visually attractive paintings, often with a smile and always without a “message”. In his paintings he goes back to the basic idea of Pop Art: glorifying the everyday around us by reducing reality to its essence in color and form.

The inspiration that lies at the basis is his biotope. His friends, family, holidays, TV programs, newspapers, etc. serve as models and surrender themselves to the vivisection of his brush.

Every new work is an experiment. Not bound by a common thread or theme, he touches on everything from his world, without limitation in the choice of his subject.

Bert has already exhibited at Nobody&Friends in April, September 2022, November 2023 and spring 2024. This time he brings Mieke De Smet and Elke Hubens. They will exhibit together from 15 till May 25, 2025.

From an early age, Elke Hubens has been fascinated by the essence of human existence. With her work she investigates what connects us as people with ourselves, each other and our environment.

With her Human Landscapes she depicts the story of Elckerlyc. She lets her work bear witness to the traces that pass through these landscapes. She shows the silent strength that emerges from our vulnerability and injuries, the desire for connection versus the need for loneliness, but above all: man as a humble part of a living universe and a reflection of its beautiful but often cruel nature.

Each Hubens' sculptures are unique. She works exclusively with clay, a fragile but powerful primeval material. She loves how it - like life - moves in an eternal cycle: from earth to clay to stoneware and back to earth again. Even after its passage in the kiln, stoneware continues to transform: color, glaze, fracture lines or the play of light transform the image into something new.

As a sculptor, Elke Hubens is largely self-taught, although she took lessons from artists such as Erica Chaffart, Monique Donckers, Miek Sysmans, ... . She is also a copywriter and storyteller, both on paper and on stage, and is the mother of two sons, the youngest of whom was born with Down syndrome.

Elke returns to Nobody&Friends for the second time, this time together with Bert Prins and Mieke De Smet from May 15 to May 25, 2025.

Ingrid Van der Vloedt studied drawing and painting mixed techniques at ABK Mortsel. Her figurative works are executed in oil paint, sometimes supplemented with a graphic accent in charcoal. In recent years, painting has become a true passion.

She works from photos that inspire her, looking for her own composition and color atmosphere. Attracted by images from everyday life, she often uses self-made photos: passers-by, tourists, day trippers.

Her main challenge is to create the atmosphere as expressively as possible.

Since 2025, she has been one of the permanent artists at Nobody&Friends and a selection of her oeuvre is on permanent display in the gallery.

From June 12 to 22, 2025, she will exhibit solo in the smaller part of the gallery.

Kaatje mainly works with two media.

She finishes her charcoal drawings with hands and fingers, this way of working feels earthy and authentic to her.

On canvas she usually uses oil paint for its color intensity and fluidity. She mainly creates character heads or fictional scenes where the viewer can imagine their own story. It is an invitation to stir the subconscious of the viewer.

Kaatje exhibited at home and abroad, but for the first time at Nobody&Friends from 8 to 11 May 2025.