Words take up an autonomous place in the artistry of Philippe Vandenberg since the mid-nineties. “You can paint a nude, you can paint a landscape, but you can also paint a sentence”, he states in a 2007 interview. More than carriers of meaning, Vandenberg conceives words as drawings or images, like nudes or landscapes are. This applies to his word-works from the mid-nineties as well as to this series of works from his last artistic phase, which Vandenberg spent in Molenbeek. The words ‘Nobody Wants Me’ are not just an exclamation of his loneliness or of his feelings of rejection. “The way in which I write them, the way in which I let them dance on the canvas, arouses a kind of astonishment that is vitally important, and one that the human being, the viewer – which is so necessary – will interpret in his own way.”​

Philippe Vandenberg’s (1952-2009) drawings and paintings strongly denounce humanity. They are moving, provocative and force us to reflect. The central theme is man’s struggle with himself and others, observed through the lens of cultural, political and social history. In Vandenberg’s art, this struggle is often critical, sometimes compassionate, but always imagined in rich colour and with a pinch of humour. ​

Since the founding of the Philippe Vandenberg Foundation in 2009, his work has been discovered across the globe. His art has been shown in solo exhibitions in Hamburg, New York, Paris, London and Seoul among others. In 2020, the first institutional exhibition in Belgium on Vandenberg since his death was held in BOZAR under the name Philippe Vandenberg: Molenbeek.​

About the Philippe Vandenberg Foundation ​

The Philippe Vandenberg Foundation generously keeps the legacy of Philippe Vandenberg mobile. The Foundation operates on national and international levels and has three objectives: to manage the artist’s estate and studio, to facilitate research into his oeuvre and to make his work more accessible in dialogue with artists, researchers, curators and the public. Around the year, the Foundation offers visits to Vandenberg’s studio in Molenbeek.