Arié Mandelbaum

The Arie Mandelbaum exhibition is an original creation of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Frequently exhibited, the work of painter Arié Mandelbaum (°1939, Brussels) had not yet been the subject of a retrospective. For the first time, old productions and recent creations engage in dialogue here, in a journey which starts in 1957 and ends in 2022. Arié Mandelbaum, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, began painting at the age of sixteen. As from the early 1960s, he was considered one of the most promising talents in Belgian painting. His idiosyncratic and compelling oeuvre continued to develop over the decades that followed. After the heightened expressionism of his early days, greater restraint followed as of the 1980s, giving rise to works of disturbing fragility, which he has created to this day. The exhibition is structured around different themes. We first discover the way in which the artist deals with intimacy, before politics – especially the anti-authoritarian protest of 1968 – telescopes his soul-searching. The visit continues with the exploration of the self-portrait and the body, two themes through which we see the work of Arié Mandelbaum transform into a reflection on trace, absence and erasure. Political violence, particularly related to (neo)colonialism, then made a marked return in his work. Over the past two decades, it has become increasingly influenced by the memory of the Shoah – as a return to what was repressed in this child of the war, who will remain a rebel painter all his life. The works presented come from the collections of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, but also from institutions such as the Museum of Ixelles, the Museum of the National Bank of Belgium or the collections of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. A number of private collections have also been mobilized, in particular those of private individuals and the Belfius Art Collection.