Artists Presented
Historical artists: Roy Adzak, César, Gérard Deschamps, François Dufrêne, Takis, Raymond Hains, Titina Maselli, Tetsumi Kudo, Jacques Monory, Daniel Pommereulle, Antonio Recalcati.
Artists from the Bardaf collective: Cyrille Aron, Francesco Batistello, Jacques Caudrelier, Sadowczyk Cauwe, Carlin Diaz, Maxime Halot, Wout de Jonghe, Gabrielle Mogenet, Jacques di Piazza, Charlie Quinonero, Julia Renaudot, Sergio Sauro, Clément Suanez, Félicien Umbreit, Loan Verbanck, Manon Viratelle, Joseph Winckler, Barbora Zilinskaite.
The Lanzenberg Gallery and the 1976 Exhibition
In May 1976, Fred Lanzenberg, a French gallerist who had been based in Brussels for ten years and supported from the outset by Ilena Sonnabend, opened “Le rendez-vous des amis” together with the artist and curator Alain Jouffroy.
Initially presenting pop artists, he later turned toward the new realist and other established figures of the french scene — Erro, Takis, and Fromanger. In the second half of the 1970s, he shifted his focus toward supporting more emerging and often unclassifiable artists. It was within this context of a transitional moment in his program that he inaugurated this exhibition.
Drawing on a 1922 work by Max Ernst, in which he replaced the faces of the protagonists with those of the 22 invited artists, Jouffroy emphasized the connections between the artists rather than their individual works. At a time when artistic movements were losing momentum and forms of individualism — still prevalent today — were emer- ging, Jouffroy sought to link artists through the friendships that united them, as if forming a movement that required no manifest.
Nevertheless, the exhibition reflected a singular moment in the Belgian and European art landscape — one marked by a figurative and narrative effervescence reacting against formalist avant-gardes, in line with the movements of new figuration and narrative figuration, which had emerged in the 1960s in France and Belgium.
The 2026 Exhibition: Memory and Creation in Dialogue
«Le Rendez-vous des amis, 1976 – 2026» at the Galerie Christophe Gaillard directly extends the original exhibition and proposes a dialogue between memory and creation by confronting historical works with contemporary productions.
It offers a dual perspective: a rediscovery of artists whose work has had a lasting impact on the history of art in the second half of the twentieth century, and an opening onto the young Brussels scene, represented by the Bar- daf collective, whose studios now constitute one of the most active hubs of emerging artistic production in the city. The continuity with 1976 is as evident as the rupture is deliberately asserted. By navigating between these two temporalities, visitors are invited to traverse half a century of artistic history, to assess its legacies, shifts, and re- sonances, and to reconsider what the notion of friendship in art — understood as an elective community, a shared ethic of making — can still mean today.
