Exhibitions
2025

THEMA EXHIBITION “EUGÈNE LEROY. A CORPS À CORPS WITH MATTER” EXHIBITION

“I cannot accumulate clarity and cloud it with shadow and obtain this matter penetrated by light as it is itself and depending only on our effort, our time, weapons in hand, I told you, for what combat, to make it be there and I be no more”, Eugène Leroy told Irmeline Lebeer in an interview given in 1979 (Peinture, lentille du monde).

To feature Eugène Leroy at Lille Art Up!, at the heart of an edition entitled “Liberating matter”, was an obvious choice. In the works of this artist from Northern France, matter is both robust and concrete, airy and alive.

Built around a selection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographic reproductions from his home studio, the exhibition “Eugène Leroy. Un corps à corps avec la matière” presents the artist’s major subjects – the nude, the portrait and the landscape – through works from different periods. It prefigures the major exhibition “Eugène Leroy. 1980-2000”, which will run from October 2025 to February 2026 at the MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing.

The MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing is a leading cultural institution in the Lille metropolitan area, with a remarkable collection of ancient, modern and contemporary art, including paintings and prints by Rembrandt, Corot, Claudel, Picasso and Baselitz. In 2009, the collection was enriched by an exceptional donation of over 300 works by Eugène Leroy (1910-2000), an internationally renowned artist closely associated with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing, renamed MUba Eugène Leroy for the occasion.

Housed in a former mansion dating from 1860, the MUba combines richness and decorative elegance. The exhibition galleries, built in the 1930s, are characterized by their vast dimensions and the special quality of the light emanating from their zenithal skylights. This exceptional building, where different eras come together, inspires many artists and hosts works specially created for the building, such as a mural by the famous American artist Sol LeWitt.

For its 17th edition, Lille Art Up! continues to promote the emerging international art scene through its INTERFACE section, created in 2022. This initiative brings together talents already very active in the institutional milieu in an exhibition that, this year, explores the art fair’s theme: Liberating Matter.

Annelies Van Damme interrogates sexualization and violence with works in which raw textures and provocative subjects convey universal pain. Taylor A. White juxtaposes paint, text, sewn canvas pieces and other materials, letting matter dictate a spontaneous, raw narrative. Bram Braam recycles abandoned urban materials into poetic sculptures. Natalia Dominguez hijacks functional objects to explore new human and spatial dynamics. Line Lyhne sets craft against industrial standardization, giving materials expressive autonomy. Wu Junyong criticizes authoritarianism and celebrates the liberating power of folk tales with his shadow-theater-inspired animations. Finally, Tobias Krämer breathes life into rubber with robotic mechanisms, revealing the tension and fragility of a material in perpetual mutation.

The exhibition questions the transformative potential of matter and its ability, once put into perspective, to translate profoundly human and universal narratives. Through their distinct approaches, the seven selected artists reveal the expressive power of matter, transcending its initial function to turn it into a vector of meaning and emancipation.

“Without matter, art is nothing” said Quintilian in the first century AD.

A work of art, whatever it may be, is always the embodiment of an intelligible content in a sensible form. In other words, an idea in matter. What does this mean? That if the world of ideas is limitless, so too is that of materials, which the artist sets out to explore.

Liberate matter! This is the theme of this year’s Lille Art Up fair, and it permeates the productions exhibited by the student-artists featured in the 2025 edition of Revelation by Lille Art Up, who come from art schools in the Euro-region: the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Arlon, ESAC in Cambrai, ECV in Lille, ESA in Tourcoing and École Saint-Luc in Tournai.

Their creations, rich and singular, blend fiction, narrative, cartography, ecology, politics, poetry and more. Various media are used (drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, photography, videography, digital prints), in all their sensitive and semantic dimensions.

At a time when Artificial Intelligence, if we are to believe certain speeches, seems to constitute a threat to the human species, isn’t it important to remind humans, as our young artists do, that they still have the possibility of acting and the freedom to create. How can we do this? By freeing speech, freeing thought, freeing matter.

Richard Skryzak