In September 2026, Galerie Zwart Huis will inaugurate its new exhibition space on Nieuw Zuid in Antwerp with El Pulso del Agua, the first major solo exhibition in Antwerp by Belgian artist Nils Verkaeren (1980). Twenty-five years after its founding in Knokke, the gallery expands its activities with a second exhibition venue, while placing the focus on a project that represents the culmination of eight years of artistic research across Colombia and South America.

Running simultaneously at Galerie Zwart Huis in Brussels, as part of Rendez-Vous Brussels Art Week, a parallel presentation explores the documentary and process-oriented dimensions of El Pulso del Agua. Together, the two exhibitions form a diptych: Antwerp presents the paintings, while Brussels offers insight into the research, expeditions, and artistic process behind the work.

Developed between 2018 and 2026, El Pulso del Agua emerged through a series of expeditions across Colombia and other landscapes in South America. What began as a search for isolation gradually evolved into an extended investigation into the relationship between painting, landscape, time, and natural processes.

Verkaeren rarely works within the confines of a traditional studio. As a contemporary plein-air painter, he develops his practice in direct engagement with the landscape, seeking places where painting is anything but self-evident. Remote environments, shifting weather conditions, difficult terrain, and logistical challenges become integral to the making of the work. In these circumstances, painting becomes a physical practice in which observation and lived experience are inseparable.

The exhibition brings together monumental paintings alongside a selection of smaller works created during expeditions to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Amazon region, Mavecure, and the river systems of the Río Magdalena, Río La Miel, and Río Cauca. These paintings are not literal depictions of landscape but condensations of experience. Canvases are carried through the terrain and exposed to rain, wind, heat, humidity, rivers, and sediment. The traces left by these conditions remain embedded in the painted surface, allowing natural forces to become active participants in the formation of the work.

Across these projects, the position of the artist gradually shifts. What initially begins as a direct encounter with a specific place develops into a practice in which painting becomes a way of moving through larger natural systems. The painting is no longer simply an image of a landscape, but a surface where time, climate, movement, and experience converge.

Water gradually emerges as the unifying principle of the project. Not as a motif, but as an underlying structure connecting different landscapes. Rivers, rain, mist, and sediment reveal the landscape as a constantly changing system, leaving their traces directly on the work. Rather than representing nature, the paintings arise through an ongoing negotiation with it, making the landscape an active collaborator in the creative process.

The Brussels presentation complements the exhibition with videos, field recordings, sketches, notebooks, and archival material that reveal the logistical, physical, and emotional realities behind the expeditions. Together with the accompanying publication, El Pulso del Agua offers a moment of reflection on eight years of working in and with the landscape.

Nils Verkaeren

Nils Verkaeren rarely works within the confines of a traditional studio. As a contemporary plein-air painter, he considers direct engagement with the landscape essential to his practice. Moving between painting and reality, he develops a visual language grounded in physical presence, observation, and sustained immersion in natural environments.

His work is driven by the constant transformation of landscapes, a dynamic translated into both monumental canvases and smaller wooden panels where time, movement, and experience are condensed into layered painterly surfaces. To deepen this relationship, Verkaeren repeatedly withdraws from urban contexts, travelling to remote locations where painting becomes physically demanding and inherently uncertain. These environments are not merely represented; they actively shape the work, leaving tangible traces on the surface of the paintings.

Rather than painting what he sees, Verkaeren paints what he experiences. By carrying his canvases through the landscape and exposing them to the elements, he develops a practice in which painting emerges through a continuous dialogue between artist and environment.