Belgium’s Office Baroque Gallery Shutters After 17 Years in Business

Office Baroque, the influential Belgian contemporary art gallery founded by Marie Denkens and Wim Peeters in 2007, has shut down after 17 years in business.

“It is with great sadness and deep gratitude for all the people we have worked with that we announce that Office Baroque is closing its doors,” the gallery wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “Office Baroque occupied an art world niche in Antwerp and Brussels, away from the buzz of the large capitals. It became a home for some of the most inspiring and diverse voices of our time to exhibit and find their way into leading institutions, collections, publications, and fairs across the globe.”

The gallery continued: “We had set not expiry date and saying goodbye to an organization that, against all odds, programed over 100 exhibitions and participated in leading fairs over 16 years, is bittersweet.”

Denkens and Peeters initially opened the gallery in an apartment in Antwerp before occupying a storefront in the city from 2008 to 2013. The duo launched their first location in Brussels in 2013 and opened a second space in the Belgian capital in 2015. Seven years later, the gallery moved location to a former gym in the center of Antwerp. “What Men Live By” is the last project by Office Baroque and runs until September 15, when the gallery closes for good.

The gallery showed emerging and established artists. It represented artists including Owen Land, Matthew Brannon, Alexandre da Cunha, Leslie Hewitt, Tony Conrad, Joe Bradley, Jef Geys, and Keren Cytter. Office Baroque also mounted notable shows for Terence Koh, Mathew Cerletty, Sophie von Hellermann, David Diao, and more.

“Our initial commitment to art came from their wish to be involved in the process of selecting the art that travels from the artist’s studio into the museum,” Denkens and Peeters wrote on the gallery’s website. “Not to be ‘in the control room, in the museum,’ but more ‘in the kitchen with the artists,’ offering visibility to cultural producers, who are not yet part of the institutional and critical discourses.”

In an email sent out on Wednesday, Denkens and Peeters lamented the lack of support and regulation for emerging and mid-career artists and galleries. “Long-term (shared) goals seem to have disappeared from the radar,” they wrote. “Being signed up by a mega gallery may have become the new holy grail of careers, for artists, gallery staff and even for gallery owners. At the very heart of the system, severe misuse of power continues to accompany admission into almost every segment of the art world, both for galleries and artists. A fix-all solution for many galleries remains to expand, in the hopes of interconnecting gallery growth, with spikes in represented artists careers, often until the very point of losing.”

In the Instagram post, the duo said they will continue to develop projects that use “a different compass to produce, curate, publish, exhibit, nurture, and discuss ideas, views, and works in ways we weren’t able to imagine before. Stay tuned.”