Adelheid De Witte (b. 1982, Roeselare, BE)’s solo exhibition ‘Coup de Soleil’ opens on Saturday 7 February 2026 at our space in Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent. Five years after her 1st solo exhibition ‘There are Fireworks after 11pm’ in 2020 we are proud to present Adelheid De Witte’s 2nd solo exhibition ‘Coup de Soleil’.
Adelheid De Witte (b. 1982, Roeselare, BE, lives and works in Ghent) is known for her abstractions of overwhelming sceneries, which are brought into balance by playful, sometimes mysterious and surprising elements that are incorporated into the work in a variety of ways. Time and again, the Belgian artist succeeds in reshuffling the core elements that define her practice, maintaining the tension between gravity and playfulness while achieving a wide range of variations in their execution. Starting from her paintings, Adelheid De Witte further extends this visual language across different media, ranging from works on paper to installations. These works invariably evoke a sense of nostalgia, memories, and her childhood. In this process, she actively seeks out materials, colours, and physical supports; such as accounting papers from her grandparents’ building materials business, a place that has inspired her from an early age.
Her work has been shown at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle, BE) as part of the Biennial of Painting; Plus One & Sofie Van de Velde (Antwerp, BE); Villa Les Zéphyrs (Westende, BE); Waldburger Wouters (Brussels, BE); Cadogan (London, UK); Irene Laub (Brussels, BE); and de boer gallery (Los Angeles, USA). In 2024, the city of Roeselare invited De Witte to present a retrospective exhibition at Ter Posterie, titled Flagada, curated by Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte. On the occasion of this exhibition, a publication of the same title was released during the solo project exhibition Rock to the Beat in Ghent. Coup de Soleil marks her second solo exhibition at BARBÉ.COUP DE SOLEIL
For the exhibition Coup de Soleil, De Witte revisits this nostalgic line of thought and develops it further through new elements drawn from memory. The weight of childhood recollections is once again brought into balance by specific symbols that refer to her childhood holidays in the South of France. In short, this exhibition, both literally and figuratively, casts light on fundamental human paradoxes: the simultaneous longing for tension and relaxation, control and letting go, distance and closeness, warmth and cooling.
On view from 7 February until 15 March 2026
Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent
Contact us for availability or more information
desk@barbegallery.be
+32 9 391 39 13