David Zwirner features The Monkey, an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, taking place at the gallery’s London location until 26th July. Borremans continues to experiment with surface and artifice in these pieces, fusing technical skills with enigmatic subject matters. The artist produces familiar yet mysterious pieces that are also humorous and unsettling.

The title of the exhibition is taken from several new portrait paintings that depict the eponymous primate, who is shown in these works from the shoulders up, adorned in blue and gold regalia. The portraits invoke The Monkey Painter (1739/1740) by the great eighteenth-century French painter Jean Siméon Chardin, showing a simian in painter’s garb at work on a canvas. Borremans’s monkey, as the artist noted in a recent interview with director Luca Guadagnino, “is a self-portrait” but “not just a self-portrait.” Rather, the artist said, “It’s a universal version of the portrait of the painter, the figure of the artist.”

While Chardin’s famous work appears to have been based on an actual monkey, the dull gaze and softly blurred and glossy features of Borremans’s monkey reveals that the subject of his portraits is not a live animal but a small, glazed sculptural figurine. He created these works by meticulous application of layer upon layer of translucent oil paint, giving the monkeys a quality of timelessness and depth that parallels the sculptural nature of the shiny figurine.

Complementing the portraits are a group of small-format panel paintings of landscapes that likewise build on the motifs and ambiguities of similar works from The Acrobat, the artist’s closely related 2022 solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Though the portraits and landscapes directly engage and subvert their respective genres, Borremans also sees them as linked: “A portrait of mine can be perceived as a landscape because it also appeals to the subconscious,” states the artist. “The work is never literal, it can never be perceived that way. It’s more emotional.”5 In these landscapes, Borremans uses scale as a tool of mystification that unsettles the relationships and hierarchies between subjects and objects. The Gardener (2023) shows a forested tableaux with the monkey figurine making a reappearance at a size that dwarfs a vitrine-like structure and several human figures below. The Smell and The Smell II (both 2023) include enlarged Cadillac hood ornaments that appear massive compared to the miniaturized cars and reclining humans in the middle and foreground. Here, as in the portraits, Borremans sets the literal and figurative stage, allowing unseen and unspoken tensions to simmer beneath the surface of his works, drawing the viewer into them.

The Monkey follows the April 2024 opening of Borremans’s solo exhibition The Promise at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, as well as The Acrobat—a show much lauded by critics including John Vincler of the New York Times, who stated that Borremans “may be the greatest living figurative painter.”