Texts / publications of Chris

This book offers an in-depth introduction to the drawings of Chris Meulemans, situating her practice within the legacy of modernist collage while articulating its renewed relevance today. Guided by an intuitive, material-focused approach, Meulemans creates works that defy finality and invite prolonged, immersive attention. Recurring plant motifs function not as symbols but as structural anchors, allowing the artist to probe relationships between image and object, nature and culture, surface and space. The drawings operate as autonomous works—open, layered, and irreducible to a single interpretation—making them particularly compelling within exhibition contexts that value material presence and conceptual precision. This book captures the immediacy and intimacy of her work, a visual poetry that asks us not to master, but to wander, linger,

Plants and flowers play the leading role in Chris Meulemans’ most recent works. The artist is not so much inspired by interior scenes or still lives, but rather by the way people interact with their environment and nature. Human history and science are filled with the urge to get a grip on nature. In a sense, humans structure nature (but also time and space) in an attempt to dominate their own environment. We are rarely surprised by manipulations of crops, plants and even animals; sometimes we aren’t even aware of them. Who even stops to think that a mandarin is not indigenous, or that exotic plants, vegetables and fruits are genetically manipulated to be able to grow in our regions?

Deze tekst verscheen naar aanleiding van de duo tentoonstelling Fik van Gestel en Chris Meulemans, Galerie NZ ‘Intersection’ is de titel van deze tentoonstelling. Ik ben het woord ‘Intersection’ toch maar eens gaan opzoeken in het woordenboek. En het heeft meerdere betekenissen in het Nederlands: ‘kruispunt’, ‘punt waar lijnen elkaar kruisen’, ‘knooppunt’, ‘snijvlak’ en ‘doorsnijding’. Zo, daar kunnen we even mee voort. Laten we naar de eerste betekenis kijken: ‘kruispunt’. Heel concreet gaat dit op voor de twee kunstenaars die hier tentoonstellen. Hun paden hebben elkaar ooit gekruist en kruisen elkaar nu weer. Fik van Gestel is in de jaren 1980 docent geweest aan de academie van Arendonk en Chris Meulemans was toen studente. Later zou zij een tijdlang in