Galerie Christophe Gaillard Brussels is deeply honoured to present Who is Liliane V.?, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by the acclaimed Belgian artist Liliane Vertessen.
Since the late 1970s, Liliane Vertessen has explored the staging of her own body through photography. Today, she is recognised as one of Belgium’s pioneers of performative photography, a practice closely associated with body art.
Born in 1952 in Leopoldsburg, Belgium, and raised in a modest family in the Flemish countryside, she discovered working with fabric at an early age, initially through play, making clothes from scraps found in the family attic. These first outfits sparked her interest in sewing and creation. More often than not, they would disappear overnight into her mother’s laundry basket, deemed inappropriate or too eccentric.
In the early 1970s, Liliane Vertessen travelled, notably to Amsterdam and New York, founded a music group, and began to develop what would become her signature artistic language. Barely eighteen years old, she started photographing herself wearing the clothes she designed and now kept. In the privacy of her studio, Vertessen photographed herself in often suggestive poses, determining the subject, the framing, and the way she wished to present herself. Once printed on a large scale, her photographs were most often accompanied by neon text reminiscent of strip clubs or peep shows. The words incorporated into the works engage in a dialogue with the images: they draw the viewer’s gaze while obscuring certain parts of the photograph, revealing as much as they conceal. Language thus becomes a visual material in its own right, generating shifts in meaning and ambiguities between what is shown and what is said.
Through these outfits, she embodies, in turn, the femme fatale, the seductress, the fantasy, the prostitute, or the woman-child, each representing a different facet of her personality. Her self-portraits do not seek to portray distinct characters. Rather, they reveal the many facets of a single identity, constantly shifting and elusive. One question thus remains at the heart of her work: who is Liliane V.?
Driven above all by aesthetic concerns, the artist asserts her right to create according to her own desires, without regard for the opinions or judgements of others. Liliane Vertessen has thus developed a practice whose freedom and radical nature challenge societal norms.
Indeed, by choosing to represent her body and femininity freely, she questions the conventions governing the representation of women, particularly when women themselves take control of their own image. The nudity in her work, which has frequently drawn criticism, exposes a double standard: what seems acceptable when initiated by a man becomes controversial when a woman claims the same freedom. This stance also reflects a broader resistance to power structures, whether within society or the art world itself.
The freedom Vertessen claims is accompanied by a rejection of the didactic role often assigned to artists. She therefore seeks neither to convey a single, unequivocal message nor to direct the interpretation of her works, preferring to leave viewers free to bring their own perspectives to them.
After beginning her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at RITCS in Brussels, Liliane Vertessen pursued her artistic education largely as a self-taught artist. Her work has since been widely exhibited in Belgium and internationally, including at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle) in 1983; at PCBK in Hasselt in 1987, in a duo exhibition with Cindy Sherman; at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent (now S.M.A.K.) in 1989, alongside Wim Delvoye; at M HKA in Antwerp in 1992; and on numerous occasions at the De Warande cultural centre in Turnhout, most recently in 2025.
