August 10, 2026 | Art & Culture
PETER BUGGENHOUT
words Rajesh Punj
photos Ugo Carmeni (FDVN Venezia 2026)
Belgian artist Peter Buggenhout is among the artists featured in The Only True Protest Is Beauty, the inaugural exhibition of Fondazione Dries Van Noten at Venice's Palazzo Pisani Moretta, on view until 4 October 2026. In this conversation, he reflects on material, perception and why a sculpture can never be understood from a single point of view.
AFTERMATH
If the history of sculpture has long been tethered to endurance, where method and material manifest meaning, then Belgian artist Peter Buggenhout begins precisely at the point of collapse, when matter loses its place and original purpose. In his book Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno coined the aphorism “the whole is the false”, arguing that what collapses is not just matter but the very idea of coherence. Essentially, what we hold to be true is always subject to change, and Buggenhout asserts through his work an aftermath of unease and serene ugliness. If his materials have long since died, these are their ghosts taking their place back in reality.
His works challenge what we understand sculpture to be: rooted and reassuring, rising from the ground up, restless and unresolved; burdened by their former selves. Stripped of their original identity—even beauty—Buggenhout’s assemblages reek of the end of everything, and for that he sees them as faceless and formless. As he explains, “you’re never finished with a piece,” insisting “you can walk around it many times… and from every position it changes.”
What is presented is far from a complete object that sits on the boundary between art and the audience, but an ever-emerging entity that burrows into the mind, tormenting the visual ease with which we see and receive the world. Blackened and bludgeoned accumulations of materials resist the possibility of any fixed lexicon or language, refusing to settle into a single meaning.
Installed within the eighteenth-century interiors of Palazzo Pisani Moretta on Venice’s Grand Canal, as part of former fashion designer Dries Van Noten’s inaugural exhibition The Only True Protest Is Beauty, Buggenhout’s assemblages challenge the building’s illusion of grandeur. The palazzo, as he observes, is filled from top to bottom with marble, yet “mainly fake and painted marble.” A space shaped by the theatrical ambitions of the eighteenth century, where “everything was about hiding the structure underneath… to make you dream away reality.”
Against this backdrop, his work—dense, dirt-filled, abject and unattractive—might be expected to confront the decoration and decorum of the palatial rooms. And yet, as Buggenhout states, “you would expect a clash of characters… yet, strangely enough, it merges. It blends.” Here, the histories of different materials rub shoulders in a homage to what the future leaves behind.
AUTONOMY BEFORE DIALOGUE
I’ve only seen a few images of the Palazzo, and, more importantly, not so much of your work installed within it. And it’s such a particular space, so charged historically and visually, that I’m curious to understand how your work is entering into that context. What are you showing there?
The piece is part of a series, I am a Tablet. It consists of two marble elements. It fits quite well in the Palazzo, because there’s a lot of marble there, but it mainly fake and painted marble. A space shaped by the theatrical ambitions of the eighteenth century, where everything was about hiding the structure underneath… to make you dream away reality. Against this backdrop, his work, dense, dirt-filled, abject and unattractive, you would expect to confront the decoration and decorum of the palatial rooms. And yet, as Buggenhout sites, “you would expect a clash of characters… yet, strangely enough way, it merges. It blends.
That’s interesting, because one would almost assume a kind of opposition, between that language of illusion, of surface, of a kind of seduction even, and your work, which insists so strongly on material presence, on weight, on exposure rather than concealment. And yet what you’re describing is not a resistance, but a kind of absorption, or coexistence. And in practical terms, how did you arrive at the placement of the work? Did you need to spend time in the Palazzo, to understand how the piece might inhabit those rooms?
I went there, and I made some mock-ups, like collage proposals, where I placed images of my work into photographs of the space. From that I made a proposal for how it might be. And then I decided to make this piece especially for that space, taking into account how it would look there.
MANY GATES, MANY KEYS
And were you aware of the other artists’ works, for The Only True Protest is Beauty exhibition, in relation to yours? Or were you thinking more independently of that dialogue?
Not really. I tend to do the same thing every time. Years ago, I was invited to a group show at Gladstone Gallery, New York in 2012, curated by Ugo Rondinone, and I was told ‘just act as if it’s a solo show’, and everything else will be draped around it. And I did the same here. I knew there would be textiles, fashion, photography, smaller works in a big Palazzo, so I thought maybe I should do the same thing, bring in something large and let it define itself.
That’s quite a decisive position, to effectively suspend the idea of dialogue in favour of asserting the work’s own autonomy. And perhaps that’s what allows it to then enter into relation on its own terms, rather than being shaped in advance by what surrounds it. I can imagine, though, that your work carries a very particular kind of presence in that setting, not only physically, in terms of scale and weight, but also atmospherically.
I don’t know, because I installed everything before the other works were there. I was the first to install, so I didn’t see that confrontation. For me, the work always finds a way to connect. I often compare my work to a castle with many gates. To get in, you need a key, but there are many keys. Once you find one, you’re in. And it doesn’t matter if the work is shown with medieval art, or land art, or whatever, there’s always a key that fits somewhere, and it connects.
WHERE MATERIALS MEET
That’s a powerful image, the idea that the work doesn’t prescribe a single point of entry, but instead offers multiple ways in, depending on the viewer and the moment. It suggests that meaning isn’t fixed, but continuously activated through encounter. When I think back to the works I’ve seen, especially when we spoke before at Axel Vervoort, what stays with me is their strong sense of presence. The way the materials come together doesn’t feel composed in a traditional sense, but almost as if they’ve arrived at a state of necessity. I’m interested in how that happens for you: how these materials, so disparate in themselves, begin to take on such a unified force. Is there a moment in the process when you recognise that something is coming together, or does it remain open even then?
Well, I think one thing that is quite important is that I consider every part of the piece, every material, as something autonomous. It has to remain autonomous, and it has to remain what it is, in its own natural behaviour. But what is really important is how things touch each other, how two materials, or colours, or feelings, bump into each other. The way they meet. They can intertwine, or they can caress, or they can clash, really press against each other. All these different possibilities of what a border can be between two things. And this is multiplied across many materials, many sensations. That’s why you cannot explain the whole piece in one word. It’s too many things at once, not only the materials, but also the borders between them, which are always shifting and changing.
So, it’s not the elements themselves, but the relationships between them, the points of contact, that generate meaning. Almost as if the work exists in those tensions, in those thresholds, rather than in the materials alone. And perhaps that’s why, as a viewer, the experience never quite resolves.
Yes, exactly. You can walk around it many times, six times, ten times, and every time it changes. Even during the day, with different light, it changes. You’re never finished with a piece. And I think this also has to do with how we try to simplify things. We always try to reduce things so that we can understand them. But then we don’t really understand them, we just reduce them. I often say, the world we live in is not a globe. The globe is already a simplification. The real world is much more like my pieces, it’s pushing and pulling and stretching, everything interacting at once. It’s far more complex than a simple shape.
THERE IS NO FRONT
That’s a striking way of putting it, that the work resists the kind of reduction we rely on to make sense of things. And that in a way, it asks the viewer to remain within that complexity, rather than resolving it too quickly. It also makes me think about language, about the difficulty of speaking about the work at all. Because the moment we begin to describe it, we’re already simplifying it, reducing it to something more stable than it actually is.
Yes, exactly. If you can describe it completely, then it’s already a reduction. That’s also why you cannot really photograph the work, because from another side, it’s completely different.
When you install a piece, do you think about where the viewer first meets it?
There is no front. The pieces are front on every side. I’m very careful about that. If you can only see it from one side, then you don’t really understand the piece. You have to move around it.
