Friends with Benefits

Friends With Benefits begins with a simple invitation. Each artist represented by BARBÉ was asked to invite one artist from outside the gallery to take part in a group exhibition. Rather than building the exhibition around a predetermined theme, Friends With Benefits takes the relationships between artists as its starting point. Each invitation reflects a personal affinity: an admiration for another practice, an ongoing dialogue, a friendship, or simply a curiosity about what might happen when two bodies of work are brought together. The exhibition temporarily opens up the gallery’s program through the eyes of the artists who are already part of it. In doing so, the usual role of the gallery shifts. The represented artists become, in a way, curators themselves, introducing practices they believe deserve a place alongside their own.

Bringing together recent graduates, emerging, mid-career and established artists, Friends With Benefits does not attempt to define a generation or propose a single shared position. Instead, the exhibition presents a network of individual connections. Some are immediately visible in the works, others less so. What connects them is the gesture of invitation itself. One artist making space for another.

Across BARBÉ’s two locations, these encounters form a temporary constellation of practices, relationships and affinities, extending the gallery beyond its existing programme and allowing new conversations to emerge.

Discover more about the artists and the pairings between represented and invited artists below the catalogue of works.

Penitentenstraat 29 + Baudelostraat 23, 9000 Ghent

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desk@barbegallery.be
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