Magnetics

A pocket-sized monograph on the Belgian painter Michaël Borremans (b. 1963), among the most admired painters of his generation, whose small, darkly lit canvases fuse the technique of the old masters with the framing of cinema and the displacements of Surrealism.

Published by Hatje Cantz for the exhibition Magnetics at BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna, the book presents a concise selection of about a dozen canvases made over the preceding five years, shown alongside related drawings and films. Its sixteen color plates concentrate on the enigmatic, psychologically charged portraits and figure studies for which Borremans is known — faces half-swallowed by shadow, gestures suspended mid-action, meaning withheld. A text by Christine Kintisch situates the work within Borremans’s wider practice. Compact at roughly 11 × 17 cm and 60 pages.