I sometimes wonder if my love/hate relationship with the city where I live isn’t mostly my own fault, and not the daily dysfunction that residents of Brussels are forced to endure. I’ve lived here for over five years after all, and only just discovered the hidden modern art oasis that is the Vanhaerents Art Collection. Not only that, it’s a 20 minute walk from where I live. Have I not been sufficiently inquiring of what Brussels has to offer?
Small and perfectly formed, Vanhaerents Art Collection is an experience on a par with London’s V&A East Storehouse and Rotterdam’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. What it lacks in size it makes up in quality. Where else can you discover works by Anthony Gormley, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy rubbing shoulders with some of Africa’s finest contemporary artists?
If you’re coming to Brussels and want to visit the collection you’ll have to plan your trip carefully. Vanhaerents is only open one day each month. Given the gems awaiting inside, the collection is low key. I’ve never seen a poster or advert for it, and it seems like that’s how the family whose private collection it is prefer it. Still, I’m glad that it’s open to the public at all, because it has to count as one of Belgium’s great art collections.
Its location, in the Dansaert area, is also low key. A theme continued by being housed in a former sanitary depot from the 1920s. It’s on a street I’ve walked down many times, and yet its existence has passed me by. The 3500m² space is spread over three floors with art placed amongst packing crates. Photographs and paintings not on display teasingly poke out of racks on the ground floor.
The museum is organised along the lines of the Schaulager Museum in Switzerland. The name is a contraction of the German ‘schauen’ (to see) and ‘lagern’ (to store). Part exhibition space and part storehouse. There is something wonderfully informal about visiting the collection, it makes it a fun experience even though you’re in the middle of a bunch of world class art.
It is helped by the fact the staff are friendly and helpful. The collection was founded by Walter Vanhaerents in the 1970s but didn’t open to the public for another three decades. Originally they hosted traditional exhibitions before turning to the schaulager model in 2018. It seeks to be “porous to the ideas, forms, and futures that define contemporary culture.” That seems like a worthy mission statement.
The current exhibition, EXH#03, opened in 2024 (remember, it’s only one day per month) and mixes recent additions to the collection and some of its most influential pieces. It aims to explore “themes such as oppression, the deprivation of freedom, and the erosion of individuality”. Which is a lot more fun and interesting than it might at first sound. In the attached Project Space is Reflections on Breathing by Danish artist Jeppe Hein.
This participatory artwork – people painted blue vertical lines over a large area – has rotating mirrors reflecting the painted walls and blue carpet, and which blend with them. It’s beautiful in an odd sort of way. There are apartments over the road that look into the space, which must be a strange perk of living there. The collection rubs up against other neighbours as well: out of one window was a man sunbathing on his balcony.
This just adds to the overall sense of discretion that the collection seems to cultivate, wedged as it is next to apartments on a nondescript street in central Brussels. Yet it isn’t too far from the nightlife hub of St. Catherine or the tourist hoards in the Grand Place. I’ll definitely be going again, except judging by previous exhibitions there’s a four year cycle. Making the next exhibition change some time around 2028.
