The selection of artworks presented in the Collecting 101 parcours at Luxembourg Art Week 2026 features a strong presence of international artists working across a range of painting techniques, alongside a pronounced interest in figurative art.
By Emanuela Mazzonis
Traditional oil painting on canvas remains particularly widespread, including among younger generations of artists, as demonstrated by the work of the two painters Lara Bloy (Galerie Pauline Renard, Lille) and Camille Brès (Galerie Ariane C-Y, Paris).
The first, an artist from Toulouse, uses the gesture of painting as a means of expressing introspection, tension, and vertigo. The female body lies at the centre of her research, often depicted in a state of suspended animation, where time and space appear frozen and transformed into another dimension. Here, a woman lies abandoned in sleep, detached from any recognisable reference to the environment around her.
In Camille Brès’s portrait, by contrast, the setting is immediately recognisable. Sunlight illuminates the profile of a little girl holding a small skeleton, while their shadows are cast onto the adjacent wall. There are no other indications of the space surrounding the figure; the light, gently enveloping this human gesture, evokes an intimate scene from everyday life.
Attention to human gesture also emerges in Manon Pellan’s graphite drawings on paper (Galerie Olivier Waltman, Paris/Miami). The white of the background, together with the white emerging from the figures’ garments, creates a luminosity that brings the intricate patterns into focus. Crossing arms, faces seemingly brushing against one another, and intimate movements evoke gestures drawn from everyday personal life. Memory and the present intertwine within a harmonious composition.
Meticulous attention to gesture is once again evident in the canvases of Korean artist Nung Saeng (ARTSKOCO, Luxembourg). Mountain landscapes are rendered with varying degrees of clarity, at times distinctly visible and at others only faintly suggested. The human figure appears small, almost insignificant, while nature dominates the scene, and the acrylic colours heighten its suspended, atmospheric quality.
The transition from realistic landscapes to surreal visions is embodied by Moroccan artist Houda Terjuman (AA Gallery, Casablanca). Her triptychs take us through “displaced journeys” in search of a lost and destabilised identity. Trees, chairs, and candles evoke the desire to rediscover the intimacy of a home that has been lost, yet remains alive within personal memory.
The energy of Sebastian Hosu’s brushstrokes (Galerie Philipp Anders, Leipzig) places his compositions on the threshold between figuration and abstract dynamism. Accustomed to working on a large scale, the artist here presents small oil paintings on paper or wood, in which the relationship between the human body and the surrounding landscape remains powerfully present. Shapes and overlapping colours interact in a visual rhythm that imbues the compositions with a pulsating sense of emotion and vitality.
We then move towards a style bordering on hyperrealism with the acrylic paintings of Paul Béliveau (Duran Contemporain, Montreal). Against a black background, an exquisitely detailed close-up reveals burnt books that have been stripped of their original function. The Autodafé series offers a visually powerful reflection on the destruction of knowledge and the forms of censorship that erase the fundamental symbolic value of the written word. Given their extraordinary precision and meticulous rendering, these paintings could easily be read as photographs.
The boundary between painting and photography becomes even more elusive in the etchings on paper by Juan Escudero (Pigment Gallery, Barcelona/Madrid). His drawings are distinguished by a highly crafted visual language in which every individual mark remains visible, leaving no room for correction. Here, the creative process itself becomes central, encouraging the eye to focus on the accumulation of individual marks rather than on the image as a whole.
An equally attentive observation of detail and of the elements that constitute everyday life can be found in the photographs of Marguerite Bornhauser (Galerie Porte B., Paris). In these colour and black-and-white images, light and colour become the protagonists of the scene. Chiaroscuro effects dominate the compositions, drawing the viewer’s gaze beyond the boundaries of the narrative. Harmonies of form, a symphony of colours, and a sustained attention to luminosity combine to create a new visual language.
Ken’ichiro Taniguchi’s PVC sculptures (Eva Steynen Gallery, Antwerp) introduce yet another narrative approach, extending the exploration beyond the two-dimensional image. His practice focuses on the concept of “Hecomi”—cracks, fissures, and damaged areas produced by natural forces on man-made surfaces such as roads and walls. Since 2000, his process has involved filling these fissures in the urban landscape with shiny yellow pieces of PVC, whose inorganic texture contrasts with the surfaces they inhabit. The process ultimately gives rise to foldable sculptures in which cracks and fractures become the compositional elements of entirely new landscape configurations.
