The Chilling Seduction of Michaël Borremans’ ‘French Paintings’

Summary

• David Zwirner in Paris presents French Paintings, a new solo exhibition by Belgian artist and filmmaker Michaël Borremans
• The show gathers new oil paintings in the artist’s signature surreal style, each inspired Frances lineage of classical image-makers and pictorial traditions

Belgian artist Michaël Borremans arrives at David Zwirner for French Paintings, his first solo outing in the country 20 years. Running from June 5 to July 22 at the gallery’s 19th-century Marais outpost, the exhibition brings a fresh suite of oil-on-canvas works into the spotlight in an “ironic homage” to France’s art historical traditions.

Borremans’ art unsettles the mind, but it’s hard to turn away. He’s best known for surreal subject matter rendered in luminous, subdued palettes, all tender and existential in equal measure. With such an arresting aesthetic signature, it comes to no surprise that he’s been the muse for other creative titans — take, for instance, Jun Takahashi in UNDERCOVER’s “Instant Calm” collection from 2016, or director Luca Guadagnino in his 2024 film, Queer.

In the forthcoming Paris show, Borremans puts his own spin on French pictorial technique, taking apart its legacy through seductive and, at times, disturbing portraits. Estranged from reality, canvases simmer with life and death, blurring the line between portrait and still-life.

The show cuts agents of violence — missiles and explosives — with artifacts of serenity, such as plush body padding and magnolia branches, unpacking the tension between threat and desire, innocence and guilt, nature and technology.

For Borremans, beauty and destruction are one and the same: “That’s very subversive, making something beautiful into an act of perversion,” he said in a 2024 interview. “I like this richness, the illusions it brings up, the way it speaks to the unconscious.”

French Painting opens in Paris on June 5.

David Zwirner Paris
108 Rue Vieille du Temple,
75003 Paris