Between Image & Surface
In this new virtual solo exhibition 'Between Image and Surface' artist Marianne Breugelmans explores the shifting boundary between photography and painting.
Working with photo–acrylic collages, she transforms fragments of reality into layered compositions where form, colour and material enter into dialogue. Through a process of selecting, isolating and reworking photographic details, familiar images gradually shift into something more ambiguous. Layers of paint, texture and material partially reveal, obscure or reshape what is seen, inviting the viewer into a visual space between recognition and abstraction.
Central to Breugelmans’ practice is a fascination with traces of time — weathering, erosion, imperfection and transformation. These qualities surface in tactile layers and nuanced colour relationships, where surfaces appear worn, softened and marked by use.
Between Image & Surface
Marianne Breugelmans
1 September - 1 November 2026
Curated by CaroArtVirtualGallery
About the Exhibition
The virtual solo exhibition ‘Between Image & Surface’ brings together a carefully curated selection of works that explore the constantly shifting relationship between photography, painting and material.
For Marianne Breugelmans, photography is never the final image. It serves as the starting point of a process in which observation gradually transforms into interpretation. Fragments of analogue photographs are isolated, enlarged, painted over and combined with textured surfaces, allowing familiar subjects to evolve into new visual realities. Although the subjects vary — from Art Nouveau architecture and historic interiors to fossils, botanical forms and urban fragments — each work explores the same central question: how an image changes once it becomes material. Photography is no longer documentation but the beginning of a transformation, where layers of paint, texture and collage gradually reshape perception itself.
Texture plays a defining role within Marianne’s artistic language. Acrylic paint is applied in translucent veils, expressive gestures and tactile structures, creating surfaces that invite close observation. Every mark contributes to a dialogue between image and material, between what is recognised and what remains open to interpretation.
The exhibition unfolds as an invitation to slow down. Rather than offering immediate answers, the works encourage visitors to linger, allowing subtle details and visual relationships to emerge gradually. With each viewing, new connections reveal themselves, demonstrating that perception itself is never fixed but constantly evolving.
Between Image & Surface is therefore not only an exhibition about photography or painting. It is an exploration of the space in between—where image becomes experience, and where looking develops into discovery.
Viewing Room
a closer encounter with the work
The Viewing Room offers an additional layer to Between Image & Surface, creating a quieter space in which Marianne Breugelmans’ works can be explored individually and beyond the narrative of the exhibition. Here, the focus shifts from the exhibition as a whole to the works themselves. Photography, acrylic paint, collage and surface can be examined more closely, revealing the details, textures and material interventions that are so characteristic of Marianne’s practice.
Removed from the exhibition route, new relationships begin to emerge. Architectural structures, fragments of nature, traces of time and abstracted forms can be viewed alongside one another, allowing recurring elements within the work to become more visible.
The Viewing Room is therefore not simply an extension of the exhibition, but another way of looking — slower, closer and with more attention to the individual work.
Explore the works from a different perspective and discover how image, material and surface continue to shift as you look again.
About the Artist
Marianne Breugelmans is a Dutch mixed-media artist whose work explores the relationship between photography, painting and material.
Working primarily with analogue photography, she creates photo–acrylic collages in which photographic images are combined with layers of acrylic paint, texture and collage. Rather than treating photography simply as documentation, Marianne uses the image as material — something that can be fragmented, reconstructed and transformed.
Architecture, natural structures and the traces left by time form recurring points of departure within her practice. Interiors, façades, fossils, organic forms and weathered surfaces are translated into compositions that move between recognition and abstraction. Through layering, repetition, colour and material intervention, the original photographic image gradually takes on a new identity. What begins as an observation of the visible world becomes a surface in which photography and painting can no longer easily be separated.
Her work invites careful observation, revealing new details and relationships as the viewer continues to look.
Exhibition Highlight
At first glance, 'La Vie Parisienne' appears almost immediately recognisable: a Parisian façade, repeated windows, balconies and the familiar rhythm of urban architecture.
But the longer you look, the less stable that architecture becomes.
Marianne Breugelmans repeats, shifts and layers fragments of the original photographic image. Windows no longer necessarily belong to the façade in which they were first found. Balconies form new rhythms, perspectives begin to overlap and the architectural structure gradually gives way to a composition of pattern, repetition and movement.
Paint enters the image almost as another architectural layer. The intense blue moves between, across and around the photographic fragments, sometimes connecting them and sometimes interrupting them. Photography and painting no longer occupy separate territories; together they construct a new surface.
That makes 'La Vie Parisienne' a particularly characteristic work in the virtual solo exhibition ; 'Between Image & Surface'. The work begins with something observed and recognisable, but does not remain there. The original photograph becomes material — cut apart, re-arranged and transformed until another image emerges.
Look again. Where does the photograph end — and the new image begin?