With this retrospective of work by Antwerp-based artist Sigefride Bruna Hautman, M Leuven reintroduces a singular and hitherto little-known practice to a broader audience. Hautman returns with a quiet force after nearly two decades away from the exhibition circuit. In an art world where visibility often feels inseparable from online presence, it’s striking to encounter a solo museum exhibition by an artist barely traceable online.
The exhibition might appear somewhat titleless — eponymously named “Sigefride Bruna Hautman” – but the work is anything but lacking direction. Hautman wears her influences openly. Figures such as Samuel Beckett and David Bowie are clearly — perhaps even legibly — present in her work. Bowie’s imprint, in particular, is vivid in “Moonproject” (1981), a series of sculptural images with pop-surrealist qualities that feel almost illustrative, like a comic incarnate. The lightning bolt pinning a blue butterfly to the floor in Moonproject 2 & 3: Zwaard en Vlinder (Sword and Butterfly) seems to echo the haunting mood of John Fowles’ debut novel The Collector (1963). But where Fowles’ pierced butterfly symbolizes obsessive control – the protagonist’s fixation on collecting rare specimens to study them in ravenous detail – Hautman’s visual translation feels closer to a romantic gesture, an embodied verse – “The man in the moon says that insects shouldn’t be crushed when they bite you.”
The exhibition text references Pittura Metafisica, the short-lived Italian movement that conjured magical realist imagery – eerie cityscapes and psychologically charged stillness — most notably in the work of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. This influence surfaces in Hautman’s sculptural portraits, beginning with Portret 1 (Vader) (Portrait 1 [Father], 1990) and a self-portrait, and continuing in sleek, dreamlike objects. Dominated by bone-white tones and various wooden surfaces, these works are presented throughout the exhibition like pearls on a string. Yet this is not self-portraiture in any confessional or self-aggrandizing sense. Hautman’s approach is allegorical and playful. Each portrait offers a carefully composed visual vocabulary, resembling an intimate and enigmatic cipher. A cosmogony unfolds— through memory turned surreal.
This particular register of the portrait continues in a double-channel video installation. Discreetly positioned in a corner of the exhibition space, it is incredibly touching. Its two-foldness calls to mind the open spread of a book or the pages from a diary. The subject of Hautman’s first video work is again her father, seen shadowboxing in the garden, dancing, moving like a sculpture momentarily brought to life. Like the metaphysical painters, Hautman maintains poetic ambiguity, crafting a fictive landscape guided by a distinct and hyperpersonal iconography.
This sensitivity is also evident in Moederschoot met eivorm (Mother’s Womb with Egg, 1993), and in the recurring portraits of Yvon – Hautman’s son with husband and fellow artist Narcisse Tordoir – each inspired by a different facet or relic of parenthood. The personal gravity of the relationships she depicts and draws upon, lends these works their resonance. Not sentimental, nor filtered through buzzwords of “care,” but genuinely concerned with the representation of care — its presence, its persistence, its particular forms.
The exhibition concludes with another page-like piece, Since I Know, You Cannot Sit on a Cloud (1987), conceived as an invitation for visitors to engage into dialogue. Hautman’s own description of the series – “abstract grid, a search for an essence” – is telling. It serves as a fitting final note: open-ended, generous, and peculiar. A gentle reminder of the domestic, socially engaged, and relational undercurrents that animate her practice.
It’s tempting to wish for a title that might frame the whole — especially given Hautman’s attentiveness to language and form. But perhaps its absence is part of the proposition? To resist summing-up, to leave space for porousness and reencounter. This retrospective doesn’t present a practice that is fixed or resolved. On the contrary, it reveals one in flux—measured, searching, and finely attuned to its own rhythms. In a moment saturated with spectacle, it’s rare to come across a body of work that speaks so softly, yet with such insistence.
