Belgian filmmaker and painter Michaël Borremans (born 1963) has made a name for himself over the past two decades, though his figurative portraiture and pastoral scenes, indebted as they are to Manet, Degas and Velázquez, look of another time, the traditional Baroque and Rococo-esque style rendering the work unsettlingly familiar. Michaël Borremans: Horse Hunting, published on the occasion of the artist's second solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2006, is devoted to the 14 new paintings on view, among them the eponymous "Horse Hunting" (2005), which portrays a young man, fashionably attired, holding two twigs from each of his nostrils. Rendered in a palette of diffused, shadowy browns, oranges and grays, Borremans' work can be characterized by its lustrous surface and eerie exploration of mental states through the careful release and withholding of visual clues. This catalogue includes a text by Belgian artist and curator Hans van Heirseele.

Michael Borremans: Horse Hunting

Arts & Photography

Michaël Borremans

History & Criticism

David Zwirner Books

<p>A plastic cap is placed carefully over a prim woman's hair. Three men wearing lab coats bend intensely over an equal number of women, examining their pupils. Two serious, smart women contemplate a white table. A man in a suit and tie smirks lightly while holding pairs of red spheres, perhaps cherries, between his fingers. A middle-aged schoolmarm sketches a windmill on the naked back of a small, brown-haired child. The figures in Micha'l Borremans's enigmatic paintings are for the moment preoccupied with a meticulous task. For how long, one wonders, have they been doing this, and for how long will they continue? The viewer, so accustomed by now to looking at everything quicker and quicker still, cannot help but look ever more deeply into these mesmerizing, puzzling oils. Borremans has caught his subjects in action, totally committed and concentrated, and they demand as much from the viewer. But no matter how close one looks, no real specificity is discernible in the depicted characters; notions of concrete time and place are dissolved in neutral tones of taupe and ochre. The vagueness of their middle-class restraint triggers a world of mildly ironic mystery, worthy of further contemplation.</p>

Michaël Borremans: The Performance

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

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Books by Michaël Borremans