Welcome to From Brussels, with Love. Part club, part conspiracy, part love letter to those who know that art is a conversation, not just something that hangs politely on a wall.
We are a grassroots initiative founded by Brussels-based artists, created for those who want to move beyond collecting and engage with the ideas that art smuggles in with its beauty.
We are not a gallery. Think of us as a wildflower in the larger cultural ecosystem. We grow alongside, cross-pollinate freely, and sometimes thrive in the cracks of galleries, institutions and events.
This is a space for dialogue, fair pay, and creative impact, where art is not simply bought but wrestled with, questioned, and championed.
https://www.frombrusselswithlove.com/
Alex Verhaest, initiator of ‘from Brussels with Love’, together with artists Delphine Somers, Anne Marie Maes, and William Ludwig Lutgens, writes the following to introduce my work:
“In the middle of Brussels, where the air tastes faintly of diesel, I take an elevator in a Q-Park that smells like old coffee and capitalism. It rattles upward through a grey sky hanging low, and opens onto another world –a rooftop Eden: lush, humming, shamelessly alive. Sage brushes against my legs, thyme tickles the air, and wildflowers lean in, gossiping. Stray bees loop lazily between basil and antennae. The city’s hum below dissolves.
It’s so improbable, witchcraft must be the only plausible explanation.
This is Anne Marie Maes’ domain: a modern-day alchemist who stirs chlorophyll with code. Her garden seduces, succulently so. It’s a living philosophy of sympoiesis, Haraway’s word for making-with rather than making-over. Here, nature and technology are lovers, mid-affair. Data hums a low purr. Science turns tender.
For years, Maes listened to the hive’s secret rhythms, translating lazy bee dances into scented soundscapes, microclimates into glowing, breathing installations. Her art cohabits, caresses. It’s what happens when care replaces control, listens instead of commands.
When I visited, she told me the bees had left. Just packed up and gone, as bees sometimes do when the timing is right. Most would call it a loss; Maes calls it a sign. Nature had whispered it was time to move on. Her curiosity, like pollen, always finds a new surface to cling to.
Anne Marie Maes has been an ecofeminist foremother to me. I look at her work in awe: its sensual intelligence, its quiet defiance, its insistence on care as a creative act. For this first edition of From Brussels, with Love, we have the great honour of presenting works made in collaboration with her bees. Brilliant art born from a dialogue whispered between species, inevitably forever lingering on the skin.
Anne Marie will donate a portion of the proceeds to La Ferme Nos Pilifs, an association in Brussels that provides meaningful, paid, and empowering work to 145 employees with disabilities and the thirty colleagues who support them. Through urban farming, green workshops, and sustainable practices, La Ferme Nos Pilifs turns environmental stewardship into a pathway for inclusion, where nature and community grow together.”
This initiative is built by and for artists. If you would like to be considered for future editions, or simply to be in touch, reach out to us at info.alexverhaest@gmail.com
A series of eight unique sets, each composed of a cover and a bottom box. Wax runs through Anne Marie’s practice like a quiet pulse. It melts, remembers, reshapes itself. After years with the bees, she lays it out in flat framed sheets that ressemble emptied combs, their metal bones exposed. They hang like paintings but insist on being sculptures. The boxes are not just objects: they are a system of relations, a small biotope where materials, species and time meet. The wax holds traces of touch and temperature, drawing us into a conversation already underway.
This unique piece feels like holding an entire ecosystem in your hand. It is a small laboratory altar. A glass funnel, a rubber dispenser, all resting on a custom metal stand. Inside is a fragrance distilled from my own rooftop hives: essential oils from pollen, nectar, wax, propolis and honey bees themselves. Every element is harvested from my urban rooftop garden biotope. It is the fragrance of a garden made volatile, an intimate archive of relations suspended in liquid form.
A soft, glowing fragment of Anne Marie’s biotextiles. Grown, harvested, and transformed from plants in her rooftop garden, these works feel like recreated skins of nature, lifted from the biotope she cultivates with such care. Plant, fibre, weather, and human touch fold into one another, turning seemingly separate thoughts and materials into a quiet network of relations. It is a small, luminous testimony to how the garden and the laboratory breathe through each other.