Dreamland

1 May - 31 May

Dreamland is for a friend. A long time he lay in a kind of sleep. Was he dreaming? Did he see light, colours, shapes, compositions, scenes? Or was everything dark? And then when he opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling with big black eyes – I mean with the pupils so wide open that they push aside the grey-blue iris – did he see past moments of life as if projected? An imagined future? There are only questions – these and many others. What life, confined inside your body? I know all my presentations of it to be unreal. But painting is also conjuring.

Ingrid Castelein
April 2025

Ingrid Castelein (b. 1953, Belgium) lives and works in Deinze to the south-west of Ghent in Belgium. She studied painting and sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and was a professor at the same institution, renamed KASK University College Ghent, from 1990 to 2020. She began to exhibit work in Belgium and The Netherlands in the late 1970’s and by the mid 80’s was showing at an institutional level. Solo and group exhibitions followed at museums such as Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in  Deurle, Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Hasselt, Haags Centrum voor Actuele Kunst in Den Haag.  In 2017 a retrospective was staged at Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek.

Her practice now spans nearly 50 years of consistent experimentation and focused, process oriented output. Consciously rejecting outcomes, Castelein focuses on action and reaction in what she describes as a game between ‘the painter-maker and the painter-viewer’, a succession of provocative moves and thoughtful countermoves. The practice has outlasted many of the spaces that exhibited her work. More recently she has exhibited with contemporary spaces such as Valerie Traan and Office Baroque, and now we are grateful for the opportunity to stage her first London solo show at Seventeen.

All copy and description of events is the responsibility of the host/originator.