Berchem-Sainte-Agathe 1082
Belgium
As 2025 draws to a close, we move forward with the firm belief that art remains a vital space for envisioning ways of thinking and living rooted in diversity and shared solidarity. In this spirit, the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation remains dedicated to exploring how an artist’s legacy can stay vibrant, open, and resonant in today’s world. Through exhibitions, residencies, and research-driven initiatives and collaborations, we engage with Walter Leblanc’s work and archive as living resources, sparking fresh dialogues, contemporary practices, and critical forms of transmission.
In recent months, we concluded a major symposium organised with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp—KASKA and the Center for Artist Archives Flanders—CKV bringing together key international voices to reflect on the archive as a living tool and to imagine new models for preserving and transmitting artists’ legacies.
Our current exhibition with Esther Ferrer and Walter Leblanc embodies this commitment to resonance across generations and disciplines. We begin the new year with a further chapter: the forthcoming exhibition by Oriol Vilanova, developed during his residency and rooted in an in-depth engagement with the Leblanc archive.
Oriol Vilanova: Crossreading. monotony is nice
With Walter Leblanc, Charlotte Posenenske, Peter Roehr, and Oriol Vilanova
January 20–May 29, 2026
Opening: January 20, 5–8pm
Oriol Vilanova is a Brussels-based Spanish artist whose conceptual practice revolves around systems of collecting and display, often articulated through large constellations of vintage postcards and overlooked cultural artefacts. His work examines how objects are framed, remembered, and circulated, questioning what shapes visibility, memory, and value. Through thousands of marginal images and objects, he constructs narratives that consider taste, power, and the staging of history.
During his residency at the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation in autumn 2025, Vilanova immersed himself in the foundation’s collection and archive. This research led him to a pivotal moment in Leblanc’s trajectory: his participation in Serielle Formationen, the pioneering exhibition organised by Paul Maenz and Peter Roehr in May 1967 at the Studio Gallery in Frankfurt. The exhibition foregrounded seriality across Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Pop Art, Op Art, and ZERO.
Taking the archive as his point of departure, Vilanova proposes to bring together three of the artists who originally took part in Serielle Formationen: Charlotte Posenenske, Peter Roehr, and Walter Leblanc. Echoing Leblanc’s investigations into repetition, light, and structure, Vilanova reflects on the exhibition format itself, on how images are curated, displayed, transmitted, and how these gestures shape collective imagination. Collecting becomes a performative, critical, and poetic gesture. This new intervention stages a shared dialogue on repetition, monotony, and seriality, resonating with the affinities and friendships that once connected these artists.
This exhibition anticipates Vilanova’s participation in the Spanish Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026.
Currently on view
Esther Ferrer and Walter Leblanc: Shared Lines
Until December 19, 2025
Shared Lines brings together the work of pioneering Spanish artist Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) in dialogue with the legacy of Walter Leblanc. Emerging from a shared interest in space, structure, materiality, and repetition, the exhibition highlights points of contact between Ferrer’s conceptual and performance-based practice and Leblanc’s serial investigations of light, rhythm, and form.
Ferrer, a central figure in performance and conceptual art, has developed a radical and feminist practice since the 1960s. Her work spans actions, installations, photography, and drawing, frequently guided by mathematical systems, particularly prime numbers, that minimise subjectivity and prioritise conceptual clarity. Her Spatial Projects, composed of taut threads arranged within handmade models, produce ephemeral architectures that propose new relationships between body, space, and movement.
Both exhibitions by Oriol Vilanova and Esther Ferrer, curated by María Inés Rodríguez in collaboration with Mirco Bimbi and Joris Dockx, are presented as part of Europalia España.
Launched with projects by Mario García Torres, Edith Dekyndt, Hana Miletić, and Marlene Almeida, the foundation’s exhibition programme has established a space for contemporary perspectives to engage with Leblanc’s work through conceptual, material, and political approaches.
On Friday December 19 at 7pm a talk will be held at the Foundation between Esther Ferrer and Laurence Rassell, curator and thinker on feminist and institutional practices. Rassel has been director of erg in Brussels since 2016, and has been appointed as the new general director of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam as of 1 March 2026.
About the foundation
Founded in 2006, the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation is a Brussels-based non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving, studying, and sharing the work of Walter Leblanc. With a collection of over 500 artworks and archival materials, and supported by a committed board and team, the foundation organises exhibitions, symposia, a residency programme, and publications in collaboration with artists, researchers, and institutions worldwide.
Our programmes are supported by Vlaamse Overheid – Departement Cultuur, Jeugd en Media, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp - KASKA, Center for Artist Archives Flanders - CKV; Europalia España, AECID - the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, and the Embassy of Spain in Brussels. With special thanks to WIELS, Brussels, and Mehdi Chouakri Gallery, Berlin.
