2024 in M: exhibition calendar
All upcoming and ongoing exhibitions at M Leuven at a glance
Dear journalist,
We wish you a sparkling New Year. May 2024 be a heartwarming year full of art and glitter.
Below you'll find all of our upcoming and ongoing exhibitions.
See you next year?
Warm wishes,
M Leuven
Exhibitions on view now
DIERIC BOUTS. Creator of images
Exhibition
20.10.23 - 14.01.24
In the autumn of 2023, M will present a major retrospective exhibition on Dieric Bouts as part of the 'New Horizons | Dieric Bouts Festival'. Never before have so many works by the Flemish master been brought together in his hometown. By radically confronting it with today's visual culture— we also bring a completely new perspective on work that is more than five centuries old.
DOKA
Exhibition
15.12.23 - 05.01.25
DOKA is the title of M’s new exhibition, assembled by guest curator Geert Goiris. It marks the return of the Belgian photographer to the museum after his solo exhibition in 2013. The natural state of the art collection is darkness. Most artworks rarely see the light of day. But just like a darkroom (‘doka’ in Dutch), that magical place where analogue photographs are developed and images are created, Goiris conceives of this exhibition as a space in which images light up from the dark.
Coming up
DISCOVERIES FROM BOUTS' ATELIER
Exhibition
16.02.2024 - 28.04.24
Bouts created his masterpieces in a Leuven studio more than 500 years ago. Exactly how he went about his work has long been a mystery but, fortunately, we still have the artworks. If you look closely, they reveal the secrets of the old master, his collaborators and later restorations. Today, researchers are making many remarkable discoveries with the help of new technologies.
ALIAS
Exhibition
15.03.2024 - 01.09.24
M presents ‘Alias’, a group exhibition on a growing phenomenon in recent art history: fictional artists. The exhibition brings together some 80 artworks from national and international public and private collections in an unprecedented display. It will span five galleries. Piece by piece, the works illustrate the strategies contemporary artists use to conflate fiction and reality, and how they confound our perception of the truth.
SARAH SMOLDERS. A Space Begins, With Speaking
Exhibition
15.03.2024 - 01.09.24
Sarah Smolders' work comes into being in dialogue with a specific space and its architectural characteristics, which she carefully observes and annotates through painterly interventions and elements. Shifts and additions barely perceptible at first sight invite the viewer to slow down, view and experience the space in an unexpected way. In doing so, Smolders deploys both the memory of the space and her own oeuvre. Residues of site-specific actions are brought back to the studio and then re-applied in new exhibitions, as her own spatial alphabet. For her presentation at M, Sarah Smolders combines different residus for the first time, as part of a new spatial intervention in the exhibition spaces next to the museum’s roof terrace.
NEW COLLECTION-PRESENTATION
Exhibition | Collection
29.06.24 - spring 2029
More information in spring 2024
PETER MORRENS
Exhibition
11.10.24 - 24.02.25
More information in spring 2024
On view continuously
Take your time
Exhibition | Collection
10.07.2020 - 31.03.2024
How long do you spend looking at a work of art in a museum? The average visitor spends 28.63 seconds. That includes taking selfies, obviously. With this collection presentation, we invite you to take your time and really look at art. To question the role of time in art. In what ways do artists actually represent time? Do you get to see the whole story presented in different scenes? Or does that one fleeting snapshot suggest the rest of the story? What does the work say about how the artist themselves look at time?
Museum in motion
Exhibition | Collection
04.03.2021 - 31.03.2024
M's collection is constantly evolving. Every year, we enrich our collection with unique pieces that tell an exceptional story. 'Museum in Motion’ gives around 20 of these acquisitions are given a place in the museum's galleries for the first time. For example, there is the 'Saint Arnulf of Metz', a late Gothic sculpture made of oak that we acquired in 2021 and there is also three paintings by Lebanese-Belgian artist Marie Zolamian (born in 1975).
The Ten
Exhibition | Collection
28.05.21 - 31.03.24
M worked with ten participants, M’s very own guinea pigs, on a collection presentation featuring artworks from the collection of M and Cera. The whole track was constructed as a digital experiment, in the form of a game with several episodes. Points could be earned per episode, which the guinea pigs then used to get their favourite artworks into the collection presentation. Each episode ended with a round of voting that resulted in works of arts being eliminated. The exhibition 'The Ten’ presents the final selection.
Form first
Exhibition | Collection
until 31.03.2024
The exhibition 'Form first' finds a home in the former splendour rooms of the Vanderkelen-Mertens home. Here, the couple received guests, held parties and displayed their opulence and curiosities. These spaces are ideal for exploring the residential and living culture of the bourgeoisie. Here you take a look at features, materials and techniques, and make comparisons between the past and the present. How was a windmill goblet used? What was a samovar used for? How long have we been eating with a fork? What messages could a lady send using a fan?
Moved
Exhibition | Collection
until 31.03.2024
Have you ever walked for hours behind a statue of a saint with a pair of wings tied to your back? Jesus dressed, rocked to sleep or laid down in his tomb? Or sacrificed your best jewellery to a bleeding host? Up until quite recently, religion played an important role in daily life in our regions. Church holidays and rituals defined the calendar and brought communities together. Pretty much everyone took part in it. Today, these traditions are much less familiar to us. But many of the objects that played a central role have survived. Some as part of the collection at M.
Bert Cornillie