BRUSSELS.- Almine Rech Brussels is presenting Summer show: After the Encounter, a group show featuring Cece Philips, Christian Quin Newell, Christopher Hartmann, Chloe Wise, Amanda Wall, and Konrad Żukowski, on view from July 4 to August 1, 2026.
How often, walking down a crowded city street, or looking out a train window, does one wonder about the countless lives flickering by? In After the Encounter Almine Rech Brussels presents a selection of paintings that speak to that impulse, centering private moments, dreams, and imagined worlds. Together, deeply idiosyncratic scenes become shared reflections, each work contributing to a collective sense of humanity.
Featuring Cece Philips, Christian Quin Newell, Christopher Hartmann, Chloe Wise, Amanda Wall, and Konrad Żukowski, the show brings together artists who transform lived experience into expressive form. Intimacy is as a guiding force, with feeling taking precedence over explanation, and sensation over narrative. Vivid images and unguarded emotions surface with quiet intensity, the canvas becoming a space where interior worlds become visible.
In the wistful cityscapes of Cece Philips, windows offer brief glimpses into the multiplicity of existence, imbued with the presence of absence, figures gazing out as if waiting. Recent works have brought the artist to the symphony hall. Between Brush and Baton places the spectator in the orchestra pit, the beating heart of a communal art form. Synesthetic and dynamic, the composition sparkles with the gesticulation of the conductor, the string section swelling into a crescendo.
Meanwhile, Christian Quin Newell’s work brings us to another universe, neither past nor future, dream-like landscapes populated by mystical, psychologically rich characters. Though connected by a shared sensibility, each of Newell’s works remains distinct, like a vision.
Beds—the most intimate of domestic spaces—serve as the evocative setting for several included works. Christopher Hartmann’s rumpled sheets evoke sex but also quotidian closeness, the promise of proximity. For Amanda Wall, the bed is a place of refuge, with multiplying figures, mirrored, repeating images that gesture to an evolving sense of self, a freedom to change when ensconced in one's own world. Konrad Żukowski’s Sleeping features a man folded into dreams, an angular Endymion inaccessible to the waking world, watched over by lover or friend.
In Body Part Chloe Wise proposes a still life centered on consumption, waste, and excess: a portrait of modern life. Somewhere between arrangement and disarray, the assemblage of objects suggests myriad interpretations, endless narratives behind this peculiar and slightly sinister collection of detritus. Another work by Wise, Finders seekers, brings the same sensibility to the figurative. Framed in an extreme close up, a female form challenges accepted ideas of beauty, ease, and desire.
Each encounter plays out in two steps: first between the artist and his canvas, then between the canvas and the viewer. This triangulation deepens and extends the experience, allowing an intimacy to first be developed within the unruly confidentiality of the studio, then shared with the viewer, inviting them into the circle of confidence.
After the Encounter evokes the tenderness and vulnerability of whispered secrets and knowing glances, the slow revelation of the most personal corners of the psyche. Meaning arises through resonance and accumulation, as the paintings form a shared visual field shaped by proximity, emotion, and depth. Searching for the universality hidden within the specific, this exhibition celebrates artists who turn sensation and impression into lasting images.
As articulated by Edward Hopper in 1953, painting can serve as a conduit for empathy and understanding, a window into another's interiority: “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world… The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design.”
— Louisa Mahoney, Researcher
Note:
Oral history interview with Edward Hopper, 1959 June 17. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
