Preview: Saturday augustus 1st 2026, 4PM - 8.30 PM
Exhibition: 1-23 augustus 2026 · Thursday to Sunday, 2:30 - 6:30PM Or by appointment
The skin we show is never quite the one we inhabit. For the second time, CWART and Grège Gallery unite their curatorial perspectives in Second Skin, a group exhibition bringing together Hanne Arends, Toufan Hosseiny, Juliette Lemontey and Lisette van Hoogenhuyze from August 1-23, 2026, around a shared question: how does identity hold itself together, at the border between who we are and what we let show?
CWART occupies a historic 1335 farmhouse transformed into a creative space, where raw concrete and original timber frames dialogue beneath large glass panels opening onto the surrounding fields. An oasis of summer serenity, minutes away from the bustling energy of Knokke-Heist. This approach echoes Grège Gallery's method, which since 2021 has specialized in investing unusual locations: castles, greenhouses, brutalist houses and now this historic farmhouse.
Toufan Hosseiny
Toufan Hosseiny explores motherhood as a radical transformation of identity through a series of quilts titled When I met you I saw myself as another, after Siri Hustvedt. Made from old and new fabrics, dyed with everyday food scraps, her quilts first evoke maternal tenderness: powdery tones from peels and rinds, soft materials assembled stitch by stitch by hand. But at the center emerge faces with hollowed-out eyes and mouths, expressive forms that recall Munch's scream. This tension between visual softness and inner violence translates the ambivalence of the experience: tenderness and exhaustion, warmth and suffocation, self-sacrifice and erasure. The instability of natural dyes extends this metaphor: over time, colors fade, the image dissolves, like a gradual dilution of identity in caring for the other.
Juliette Lemontey
Juliette Lemontey paints intimacy on old sheets, those linen canvases that have carried past existences and which she reinvents. With charcoal, walnut ink and artisanal oil paint, she captures private moments: bodies in underwear, tender gestures, figures protecting themselves or withdrawing. But it is the faces that reveal her approach: often erased, turned away or concealed, they question what we choose to show or hide about ourselves. These sheets charged with domestic memory become the support for a reflection on our shadow zones, those parts of us we keep secret. As if identity, too, nestled in the gap between what we reveal and what we withhold, between bare skin and the averted gaze.
Hanne Arends
Hanne Arends presents a triptych of wall tapestries in wool and Tencel, works developed in collaboration with a specialized textile team. Her compositions explore those everyday moments when you are "completely with yourself": cooking, showering, coming home and closing the door behind you. These universal gestures, usually so self-evident that they go unnoticed, suddenly reveal their complex emotional charge. Arends maps that grey territory where solitude oscillates between heaviness and freedom, between isolation and precious connection with oneself. Her tactile tapestries make the invisible visible, translating into physical matter those inner experiences we carry but never show. The gestures are recognizable, their emotional resonance remains hidden.
Lisette van Hoogenhuyze
Lisette van Hoogenhuyze presents "Fuxico Fofoca", a large hanging textile piece punctuated with dozens of ceramic hands and feet. The title combines two Portuguese words evoking gossip and female communal exchange. The work draws from the mythological imagery of Callisto and Diana, scenes where pregnancy, shame and female collectivity intertwine, to reinvent them in a tactile language of fabric and clay. Her ceramic hands and feet become symbols of carrying and being carried by family, community, generations of women who came before. Alongside, she unveils a monumental seven-panel folding screen in burlap and painted wood, referencing dressing screens, domestic architecture, theatrical backdrops. Between concealment and exhibition, the work questions the freedom to take multiple forms, to hide, reveal, transform. Identity reveals itself as layered, changing, constructed through relationship.
In Second Skin, identity reveals itself less as given data than as a process of permanent negotiation. Between Toufan's pierced masks and Juliette's erased faces, between Hanne's intimate gestures and Lisette's screens, emerges a sensitive cartography of our shadow zones. The exhibition questions this complex territory where we construct ourselves through what we reveal as much as through what we conceal. In the era of multiple identities and social networks, what do we really hide behind our second skins? These four practices suggest that authenticity perhaps lies not in transparency but in the capacity to fully inhabit the gap between our interiority and what we let show of it.
