Belgian architectural practice Gijs Van Vaerenbergh celebrates its 20th anniversary with a major project, a book and an exhibition
In 2026, the Belgian artist duo Gijs Van Vaerenbergh marks its 20th anniversary with the realization of a major new project, CLAUSURA, commissioned for Herkenrode Abbey in Hasselt, alongside the publication of a new book and accompanying exhibition titled Fictional Ruins. Together, these milestones articulate the studio’s distinctive position at the intersection of art, architecture, and heritage.
Founded by Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh, the Leuven-based practice has, since 2006, developed an internationally recognized body of work that consistently challenges architectural conventions. Moving fluidly between permanent structures, monumental installations, scenographies and objects, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh approaches architecture not as a fixed discipline, but as an open field of spatial thought and artistic inquiry.
A practice shaped by perception, memory and abstraction
Trained as architects, Gijs and Van Vaerenbergh combine technical precision with a fundamentally experimental attitude. Their projects are often characterized by reduction, abstraction and repetition, resulting in architectures that oscillate between construction and image, presence and disappearance. What unites their diverse output is a sustained focus on how space is experienced — visually, bodily and temporally.
Rather than prioritizing function or typology, the practice frequently deploys artistic strategies to destabilize the utilitarian logic of architecture. Their interventions invite viewers to reconsider architecture as something that can be read, wandered through, or perceived as a drawing in space. Context plays a crucial role: each project responds carefully to its site, often engaging with historical or symbolic landscapes and translating them into contemporary spatial forms.
This approach has resulted in a series of widely recognized works, including Reading Between the Lines (Borgloon, 2011), a semi-transparent steel church that dissolves into its rural surroundings, and Labyrint (C-mine, Genk, 2015), a monumental steel maze that transforms disorientation into a spatial experience. In Colonnade (Bruges Triennial, 2021), a pavilion-like structure composed of a grid of 100 columns, architecture becomes both rhythm and monument. More recently, Island Garden (Meise, 2022) introduced a new water landscape in the botanical garden of Meise, blurring boundaries between architecture and landscape design.
CLAUSURA — A new major project
At the heart of the anniversary year is CLAUSURA, a large-scale installation commissioned by Herita (National Trust for Flanders) for the grounds of Herkenrode Abbey near Hasselt. The project forms part of a renewed visitor experience that guides visitors across the entire abbey site, leading them along and through its remarkable historic buildings and landscape.
Once one of the wealthiest Cistercian abbeys in the Low Countries, Herkenrode lost the core of its monastic ensemble over centuries of destruction and decay. The cloister — the spiritual and spatial heart of the abbey — has entirely disappeared.
Herkenrode was founded at the end of the 12th century and became a Cistercian abbey in the 13th century, soon becoming one of the richest in the Low Countries. The spatial and spiritual heart of the abbey consisted of the cloister, a unified ensemble of various buildings. Anchored by the 16th-century Gothic church, it included a convent building, an infirmary, sisters' quarters, and other outbuildings, all organized around two large cloister gardens and surrounded by long galleries.
Throughout its history, Herkenrode experienced several periods of deterioration and destruction, with the lowest point being the church fire in 1826. The historic core of the former abbey will ultimately be entirely demolished. Today, only the chapel and remnants of the sisters' quarters and the old infirmary remain of the original cloister. Once the beating heart of the abbey, the place now only exudes emptiness.
Gijs Van Vaerenbergh was commissioned to conceptualize an artistic vision for the vanished heart of Herkenrode. Their installation, CLAUSURA, brings the vanished buildings back to their true scale and original location. It is an artistic and spatial intervention that evokes the memory of the lost ensemble without resorting to an exact reconstruction. A structure of thin steel tubes is used to outline the vanished buildings of the cloister, as if they were drawn into the space. The new volumes are transparent, allowing their silhouettes to blend seamlessly with the landscape in the background. From some viewpoints, the lines disappear, and from others, they remain clearly visible. The intervention balances between reconstruction and abstraction, as the original structures are evoked through a refined play of suggestion. Iconic details such as windows, vaults, and towers enhance the sense of recognisability, although at times, these elements dissolve back into a chaos of lines.
The existing ruins of the sisters' quarters, the infirmary, and the arcade, made of brick and wood, are preserved from further decay and completed by means of a steel framework. As such, a composition of old and new elements emerges. The steel structure replicates the existing roof structure, which is still partly visible in the sisters' quarters and partially covered in the infirmary. In this way, sheltered areas for temporary use are created.
Clausura is being built in three phases. The first, and by far the largest phase, will open on 18 June 2026 at Herkenrode Abbey.
20 years — Fictional Ruins (publication and exhibition)
To mark its 20th anniversary, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh presents Fictional Ruins, a compact thematic publication accompanied by an exhibition of the same title.
Rather than offering a chronological overview, the book focuses on six specific works — one earlier project and five recent interventions — all examined through the lens of historical heritage and architectural memory: The Upside Dome, Folly, Harbour Castle, Inverse Ruin, CLAUSURA and Kansas City Spirit. Together, these projects explore architecture as reconstruction, fragment, echo or speculative remnant.
Across these works, architecture appears as a fictional ruin: something that hovers between past and present, between construction and erosion, between monument and image. The publication reflects on recurring themes in the practice — spatial reconstruction, abstraction, scale and the dialogue between architecture and landscape — and situates them within a broader reflection on the role of architecture as an artistic and cultural act.
The exhibition, opening on May 7th at the Bac Art Lab in Leuven, translates these ideas into space, offering insight into the studio’s working process and conceptual framework.
You are warmly invited to the opening on Thursday, May 7 at 19:00h
Exhibition: 08.05 — 13.06.2026 (Thu–Sat, 13:00–18:00) at Bac Art Lab.
More info here
Artist Talk: May 21, 20:00 at Bac Art Lab (Let’s Talk Leuven)
Ongoing and forthcoming projects
Alongside CLAUSURA, several other projects mark this period:
- Harbour Castle, a work that plays with reconstruction, scale and the legibility of architectural form.
- Folly in Doorn, an autonomous architectural intervention situated in the landscape, exploring structure, repetition and ornament.
- Kansas City Spirit: Gijs Van Vaerenbergh was selected in August 2025 for the $2.18 million public art commission at Barney Allis Plaza, an iconic landmark in Kansas City.
Please contact us for more information about (one of) these projects.
Micha Pycke
Club Paradis
+32 (0)486 680 070
micha@clubparadis.be
About Gijs Van Vaerenbergh
Gijs Van Vaerenbergh is an artistic practice founded by Pieterjan Gijs (b. 1983, Belgium) and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh (b. 1983, Belgium). Their work operates at the intersection of art, architecture, and landscape, and takes the form of public artworks, site-specific installations, and landscape interventions.
Combining technical and theoretical architectural knowledge with an experimental attitude, their practice consistently engages with the visual arts. While architectural in nature, their works are often monumental, sculptural, and autonomous. Rather than stepping outside the discipline, they seek friction from within architecture itself.
As their work is primarily spatial, the relationship with the viewer is fundamental. The experience of the work—its physical presence and its interaction with the surrounding environment—is central to their practice. Gijs Van Vaerenbergh deliberately breach disciplinary conventions, appropriating artistic strategies to infuse architecture with multiple registers and to question its programmatic and utilitarian assumptions.
