Amid thunder, lightning and the heavy drops of a summer downpour, the latest edition of the Ooidonk Art Festival 2026 opened at the historic Goed te Réables estate, near Ooidonk Castle. This open-air exhibition of contemporary art seamlessly integrates artworks into the natural landscape, as well as into the farmhouse, barns, stables, carriage shed, bread oven and orchard, all enclosed by hedgerows and a lime-tree avenue.

The estate was established in the early seventeenth century at the initiative of the della Faille family, owners of Ooidonk Castle. Originally, it served as a working farm supporting the castle estate. The oldest part of the complex is the farmhouse itself, dating from the first half of the seventeenth century. In 1856, Baron du Bois built a distillery here to supply the castle with gin.

Paying tribute to this aspect of the estate’s history, the site now hosts a summer bar and the pop-up BARASART venue, offering an extensive cocktail menu, alongside the Hay restaurant overlooking the exhibition route.

It is a truly enchanting setting, and June is the perfect time for an open-air art festival. Visitors and sculptures alike are bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.

An interesting fact – parts of the estate have served as filming locations for several Belgian films and television series, including the adaptation of the comic book De Duistere Diamant (“The Dark Diamond”).

Ooidonk Castle and the Goed te Réables estate have been owned for the past 160 years by the t’Kint de Roodenbeke family, one of Belgium’s oldest aristocratic dynasties, whose roots can be traced back to the ancient patriciate of Brussels. The family is connected to the historic Seven Noble Houses of Brussels and has played a prominent role in the country’s political and economic life for several centuries. Harold t’Kint de Roodenbeke, a former president of BRAFA (Brussels Art Fair) and a distinguished art dealer, belongs to this influential lineage.

The family motto is “Perseverando” – “Through Perseverance” or simply “Perseverance”.

The Ooidonk Art Festival is organised by the Ghent-based gallery Francis Maere Fine Arts, which is also a regular exhibitor at BRAFA each year. The driving force and founder of the project is its director, Francis Maere, a Belgian art dealer and gallerist. The gallery curates the festival and, in 2026, selected 150 works by 34 leading Belgian and international artists.

Among the featured names are Johan Creten, Koen Vanmechelen, Wim Delvoye, Jan Fabre, Dirk Braeckman and Philippe Perrin. The selection is of a calibre comparable to BRAFA, one of Europe’s leading art fairs, where the contemporary art section continues to grow year by year.

From an art-historical perspective, the Ooidonk Art Festival can be described as a private curatorial art project, developed by the gallery as an annual summer open-air exhibition.

Johan Creten and “La Cathédrale”

In one of the most prominent spots on the estate, where visitors gather, sitting or standing with cocktails in hand, is La Cathédrale (1992–2000) by the Belgian artist Johan Creten. The sculpture reads as a strange organic monument – at once architecture and a living organism.

The bronze form does not depict a cathedral literally. It is a female torso, as if a “cathedral growing out of nature,” where Gothic associations dissolve into a biomorphic materiality. Creten is one of the key European sculptors of his generation. He studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Ghent and Paris and, since the 1980s, has consistently brought ceramics and bronze back into contemporary art as fully legitimate artistic media.

His work operates in a tension between attraction and repulsion, corporeality and the sacred, nature and architecture. In La Cathédrale this logic becomes especially clear. Instead of a religious symbol, the “cathedral” appears as an idea of growth, pressure and inner formal energy. The sculpture creates a sense of something sacred without religion. Against the backdrop of the Goed te Réables landscape, the work reads as a quiet vertical signal – an organism that continues to “grow” within space.

Because the female, curving form can evoke associations with Kim Kardashian, an additional layer of interpretation emerges: a hypertrophied sexual body as an object of admiration, a cathedral and a style icon (or, for some, a symbol of bad taste). However, the bronze was created between 1992 and 2000, well before Kim Kardashian’s public prominence – which only reinforces the idea of formal and conceptual transformations embedded in the sculpture long before such cultural references existed.

Looking inside the cowshed – its red door marked with a tongue-in-cheek “Pigs / No pigs” – we encounter two works from Jan Fabre’s Brain Sculptures series, featuring brains and hybrid organic forms.

Jan Fabre’s The Brain of the 1st of May (2018) continues his long-standing exploration of the brain as a universal image, not so much as an anatomical organ (although his work is undeniably rooted in corporeality), but as a model of consciousness, memory and the human inner universe. In this series, Fabre poses the question: “Do we feel with our brain and think with our heart?”

Here we see a kind of biological deformation: from the gilded bronze brains, lily-of-the-valley flowers emerge. This outward growth appears as an extension of the nervous system or thought itself. The title is distinctly Belgian – 1 May, Labour Day in Belgium, is traditionally associated with the offering of lily-of-the-valley, especially to grandmothers.

Bronze, traditionally linked to monumentality and formal stability, is paradoxically used by Fabre to convey fluidity and organic growth. The surface of the sculpture lacks the polished finish of classical academic bronze; instead, it vibrates, as if caught in a continuous state of biological transformation, resembling at once a neural network, a coral reef and an expanding biome.

Even in the cowshed, the “1 May brain” rests on a cushion, like a relic in a Catholic church. The sacred and the bodily merge, together with the symbolism of International Workers’ Day. A very typical Jan Fabre gesture.

One of the estate’s barns, with cobwebs and streaks on its walls, becomes an exhibition space for works by the Belgian artist Nick Ervinck, who works at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and digital design.

His style is often associated with blob architecture – that is, forms without rigid angles, organic and fluid structures inspired by liquid, coral or tissue. His sculptures resemble overgrown plants, corals or bones, alien-like “living structures,” flowing waveforms. They appear alive, yet do not exist in nature.

These works are placed under glass domes. Beyond their purely protective function in the dusty barn environment, the domes introduce an additional semantic layer. Under them, the sculptures exist in a state of “suspended life” – simultaneously exhibited and isolated.

This gesture turns Ervinck’s works into a kind of quasi-laboratory. Biomorphic forms, reminiscent of fragments of non-existent organisms or digital mutants, are fixed within transparent shells, like specimens in a scientific archive. A duality emerges: on the one hand, the sensation of something living, growing and potentially infinite; on the other, its transformation into a museum artefact deprived of development. The result is deeply captivating for the viewer.

Nick Ervinck (1981) was born in the small West Flemish town of Kortemark and studied fine arts in Ghent at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK), after which he returned to another provincial town, Lichtervelde.

Indeed, West Flanders has become something of an art cluster for contemporary Belgian artists – with lower rents than the major cities, larger studio spaces, and what could be described as “landscapes of solitude” as an aesthetic condition of life and work.