The Badger's Song

The Badger's Song gathers seven years of Michaël Borremans's painting into a single volume and shows how working in series has become the structure of his practice.

The book is organised by series rather than by date: Black Mould, Fire from the Sun, Coloured Cones, Girl with Hands and the title group The Badger's Song among them, with 160 colour plates at close to full scale in a large hardcover of 178 pages. Most of the paintings had never been reproduced before. First issued by Hannibal Books in Belgium in 2020, the edition here was published by Walther König in 2021 with the subtitle Series 2013–2020.

Borremans (born 1963, Geraardsbergen) paints with the tonal restraint and glazing of eighteenth-century portraiture and turns it on scenes that refuse to resolve: hooded figures, children in dark robes, faces cropped or covered. He has had solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, BOZAR in Brussels and the Hara Museum in Tokyo, and the earlier Black Mould catalogue is already on this shelf.