To celebrate Inès van den Kieboom's 95th birthday, the Inès van den Kieboom Foundation and Tim Van Laere Gallery are organising an exhibition at National 55 in Antwerp. The exhibition will feature around twenty recent and new paintings. It is her first solo exhibition since her exhibition Le Temps des Cerises at Tim Van Laere Gallery in 2023.

Van den Kieboom finds inspiration for her works mainly in her everyday surroundings, but also in art history, popular culture and current events. She paints and draws her subjects through a filter of memories and impressions, which allows her to eliminate superfluous details and abstract her subjects to their figurative essence. Painting from memory gives van den Kieboom room for artistic invention, allowing her to convey visual elements of a particular moment and the emotions associated with it. This is also what appeals to the viewer and elevates the everyday themes of Inès van den Kieboom to universal truths.

Like the French painter Henri Rousseau, Van den Kieboom had no formal artistic training. This immediately explains the similarity between her work and that of “Le Douanier Rousseau”; both developed their own unique style, unhindered by the traditions of classical training. They determine the rules of their painterly universe and take the liberty of depicting things as they perceive, remember or feel them. Van den Kieboom also often plays with the representation of reality in a humorous way in her work.