Marijke de Cock lives and works in Antwerp, where she previously studied Fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She has been working for years as a desginer within the team of Dries Van Noten, where she specialises among other things, in the conception and creation of exceptional ornaments and jewellery. An engagement that in a sense inspired her personal practice, by adopting an established craft that is usually related to the garment it is meant to serve, yet which she allows to function autonomously and in full. It is an ancient and traditional, time-consuming technique – involving working with glass beads and passed from generation to generation – which she sensibly juxtaposes with her fascination for the hand that, as it were, moves by itself, seems to make its own decisions, and transcends thought. It all together manifests itself in distinctive series of abstracted, intuitive wall sculptures which, adorned with beads, above all celebrate the desire to create, using a material that goes back thousands of years, motivating us from childhood onwards to invent ornaments with it, to embellish a person or a place.

Laurence Leenaert is an artist steered by the gentle hand of intuition. Navigating mediums and continents, her work shares a deep kinship with the native Moroccan landscape in which she is immersed.

IZDIHAR (“Unfolding”) marks a new destination in Laurence’s artistic pilgrimage with a prolific collection of mixed-media paintings steeped in the sensorial ambiance of Marrakesh.

Working viscerally, Laurences’ artistic journey has come to settle upon this striking collection of large-scale paintings through an innate channeling of the environmental and architectural landscapes in which she finds herself.