Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens presents the first institutional solo exhibition by Libasse Ka
Libasse Ka
Notes on Shape Shifting
21 September – 21 December 2025
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens presents Notes on Shape Shifting, the first institutional solo exhibition by Libasse Ka (born 1998, Camberene, Senegal). Libasse Ka lives and works in Brussels, but spent his childhood in Senegal until the age of ten. His biography is reflected in his artistic practice: he constantly moves between different cultural and artistic contexts, without ever fully identifying with any one of them.
The exhibition at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens presents a series of new paintings, created in 2025. In them, Ka continues his ongoing search for the essence of painting and explores the boundaries of his personal painting process. His practice is rooted in movement, repetition of forms and metamorphosis. It is a working method that is at once intuitive and reflective, physical and conceptual.
Notes on Shape Shifting
Libasse Ka approaches painting as a process of layered transformation. His works are created through the repetition of forms, delays and reformulations. He often returns to older or unfinished canvases, which he reworks in an attempt to answer open pictorial questions or revise unresolved passages. This cyclical process results in paintings that have been built up over time, not snapshots, but visual timelines in which thoughts have been recorded, erased and reformed.
His compositions exude rhythm: shapes shift, touch each other and flow into one another. The compositions seem to emerge from a unity that existed before the canvas was created, suggesting a visual language that is not static but constantly evolving. Colour plays an essential role in this. Just as a musician chooses his notes, Ka composes with contrasts, repetition and variation. The result is a sensory experience that balances between order and improvisation.
Matter, colour and gesture
Libasse Ka's paintings arise from an intense combination of physical action and experimentation with materials: pressing, rubbing, wiping, splashing, painting over. He uses unusual means such as ropes or plastic to transfer pigment, transforming the painting itself into an archive of actions, a memory of body and mind, a kind of visual mind map.
Ka hardly ever uses a brush in his large canvases, except to add a final detail. Instead, he pours, rubs or scratches paint, or lets a cord whip across the canvas, while applying pressure with pieces of plastic. These methods shift the emphasis from the classic brushstroke to a more direct, often performative interaction with the canvas. Painting thus becomes a physical and almost ritualistic act, in which chance and control, intuition and strategy are constantly balanced.
A recurring feature in his recent work is the visibility of the linen: unpainted areas give the image space to breathe and evoke a sense of openness. In some of his most recent works, created especially for this exhibition, forms even seem to be on the verge of dissolving. Paint becomes fluid, almost transparent, a material metaphor for change.
Ka's colour palette is highly distinctive. Shades of blue, pale yellow, ochre and pink mark movements, suggest depth and emphasise the process-oriented nature of each work.
Intuition as a method
Although Ka's paintings often appear intuitive or improvised, the artist emphasises that his process is based on a subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious choices. His familiarity with art history, his technical knowledge and his personal experiences form a solid foundation, but at the same time he leaves room for coincidences, deviations and unexpected twists. For Ka, intuition is not a sudden inspiration, but a well-considered strategy: a way of working that consciously remains open and constantly makes room for detours and reflection.
This same openness also characterises the meaning of his work. Ka rarely gives his paintings explanatory titles, because he does not want to steer the viewer towards a fixed interpretation. Instead, he encourages personal interpretation, association and feeling. Each painting thus becomes an invitation to encounter: a space in which the viewer's subjectivity, memory and projection are free to move.
Through this interplay of discipline and freedom, knowledge and intuition, Ka's work remains in flux. It escapes unambiguity and continues to resonate in the viewer's experience, who is invited time and again to contribute to its meaning. Ka thus positions his painting within what could be called a “hidden reserve” of painting: a domain that opens up as soon as the gesture is no longer purely expressive, but can also become a semiotic trace, a sign, a memory, an invitation to interpretation.
Libasse Ka looks up to the painting strategies developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by artists such as Joan Mitchell and Cy Twombly, and later taken up again by Christopher Wool. They too liberated the painterly gesture from the purely expressive and explored how a brushstroke, a stain or a scratch can be both a material trace and a carrier of meaning. Where Mitchell spoke of ‘memory working’ and Twombly loaded his gestures with semiotic and mythical connotations, Ka refers to this research in a contemporary, hybrid language rooted in both his African background and Western art history.
A hybrid position
Libasse Ka's work is rooted in an intimate knowledge of Western art history, which he incorporates into his work. In doing so, he draws on Josef Albers' colour research and Francis Picabia's experimental visual language, among other things. His friendship with painter Jan Van Imschoot, who has been his loyal conversation partner on painting for many years, also plays an important role in this process. At the same time, his African background remains palpable, especially in the intensity and layering of his use of colour.
The result is a visual language that cannot be reduced to a single origin or tradition, but rather arises from the tension between the two. This intermediate position, between continents, styles, stories and systems, gives his oeuvre a hybrid, layered and distinctly personal character. It is work that invites us to look beyond binary oppositions and be open to the transformative power of multiple perspectives.
In dialogue with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
On the occasion of the exhibition, Libasse Ka enters into dialogue with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, one of the most influential figures in contemporary dance, with whom Libasse has built a stimulating friendship over the past few years. In the run-up to the exhibition, the two artists engaged in conversations about movement, rhythm, space and form. Filmmaker Evi Cats captured this exchange in a poetic film, which will be shown during the exhibition.
Clapping Music
On 21 September, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Laura Maria Poletti will perform Clapping Music as an intense duet in Libasse Ka's exhibition: a rhythmic dialogue that unfolds in minimal variations and shifts to the music of Steve Reich.
Clapping Music (1972) is an iconic piece of music by American composer Steve Reich, built around a simple principle: two musicians clap the same pattern of twelve eighth notes, with one of them shifting the rhythm slightly each time until both coincide again. These phase shifts form the core of Reich's minimalist compositions and a lasting source of inspiration for De Keersmaeker.
In 1982, she made her international breakthrough with Fase, a choreography based on four early compositions by Reich. In this work, she does not develop an illustration of the music, but rather an autonomous logic of movement that deepens and visualises Reich's repetitive structures. Parallel lines, circular routes and minimal shifts in movement and tempo build layered patterns in which dance and music challenge each other. At the same time, the light-footed choice of movement vocabulary subtly refers to the classical dance tradition — a playful nod that connects the shifts in form and rhythm with broader histories of dance and art.
Notes on Shapeshifting thus presents itself not only as a painting exhibition, but as a resonant space in which image, movement, sound and thought enter into dialogue with one another. An invitation to change — not only in form, but also in perspective.
Libasse Ka
Notes on Shape Shifting
21 September – 21 December 2025
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
Museumlaan 14
9831 Sint-Martens Latem
Selection of images
