main partner
23—26.04.26 Brussels Expo
main partner
Art Brussels 2026 opens with a major new commission by Belgian artist Natasja Mabesoone titled Cher mouths Mary, Mary mouths Cher.
Invited to create a site-specific installation at the entrance of the fair, Mabesoone, represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, will transform the arrival experience into a compelling artistic statement, setting the conceptual and curatorial tone for this renewed and ambitiously curated edition.
The wallpaper for the installation will be produced and kindly supported by Masureel
Art Brussels 2026 | Natasja Mabesoone
Cher mouths Mary, Mary mouths Cher
Through a pinkish aura of whispered gossip, opera glasses, blusher, and side-eyed glances, visitors enter Art Brussels 2026. Two women observe a stage outside the frame, feigning unawareness, creating a fluttering fourth wall. Another appears as a pattern, posing triumphantly with shopping bags. Natasja Mabesoone transforms the art fair’s infrastructure into a continuous mural. In a gesture of professed submission to the architectonic structure, the work does not simply overlay the space but instead envelops and claims the entire environment. Ticketing areas, information desks and circulation zones are absorbed into a mise-en-scène of mirrored images and reshuffled meaning. Tapping into art historical, feminist, mythological and pop-cultural image economies, Mabesoone culls Mary Cassatt’s In the Box (1879) and the Clueless (1995) protagonist Cher Horowitz as the foundation (pun intended) of her site-responsive installation.
Mabesoone’s practice takes shape at the knotting crisscross of printmaking, drawing, and painting, where her characteristic material commitment engages with snippets of language and socio-political pondering, transforming them into a haptic experience.
Silkscreened makeup prints are built up through processes of touch and pressure, using fingertips or even the mouth, then further manipulated with bronzer, lip stains, and eyeliner, before being reproduced and enlarged into an architectural scale. Skin tint and foundation, the base of a painted face, here double as ink. Through successive stages of transfer and reworking, the work remains sensitive to variation, smudges and chance. Each impression carries traces of what registers and what resists pristine reproduction, both understood as equally seductive.
The composition of the collaged elements (including annotated pages of Anne Carson’s Economy of The Unlost, a ghostly interpretation of Gerard van Honthorst’s The Matchmaker and a nod to the obscure figure of Baubo) reframes and subverts the gaze. Mary Cassatt’s women are active viewers rather than objects of display, a gesture that underpins Mabesoone’s characteristic mode of oblique resistance. Visual languages that are often coded as cute or feminine are appropriated to destabilize hierarchies of perception and value. In the context of Art Brussels, Cher mouths Mary, Mary mouths Cher becomes a tongue in cheek reflection on the art fair’s self-contained environment propelled by desire, while simultaneously exposing the dynamics that structure the contemporary art spectacle.
Natasja Mabesoone is part of the artist-run cooperative Level Five, and is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde.
— Febe Lamiroy
Natasja Mabesoone (°1988, BE) works at the porous edges of printmaking, drawing, and painting, where conceptual reflection, material engagement, and social context exist in constant dialogue. Her practice departs from the understanding that the printing press is never neutral: it registers touch, pressure, residue, and loss, producing images through repetition and degradation. Each impression carries traces of what transfers and what resists, foregrounding contingency, chance, and failure as productive forces within an image economy shaped by consumption, saturation, and power. Language and image intersect in Mabesoone’s work as sites of politics and social construction. Through a feminist lens, she unpacks myth and pop culture, examining how meaning is produced, circulated, and deconstructed.
Her practice activates visual languages often coded as feminine—glitter, makeup, scratch lettering, stencils, and temporary tattoos— alongside etching, monotype, silkscreen, collage, drawn scribbles, and painterly gestures. These elements are never mere ornament. The cute and decorative operate as subtle, oblique forms of resistance, gently destabilizing hierarchies of value, authorship, and visibility. Mabesoone’s work attends to the slippages between seeing and touching, knowing and feeling, proposing vulnerability, play, and attentiveness as critical strategies for navigating contemporary visual culture.
Processes of gossip, repetition, translation, and mis- or re-reading shape her exhibitions, where works mutate and rearticulate earlier gestures. Installations, works on paper, murals, and site-specific interventions respond to their surroundings and to one another, generating spaces in which instability, contamination, and pleasure become critical vectors.
Sketch by Natasja Mabesoone, 2026