The Painting Lesson | anniegentilsgallery

Jacqueline Peeters - The Painting Lesson – Exhibition: 10.10 – 22.11.2026

The Painting Lesson is Jacqueline Peeters’s second solo exhibition at Annie Gentils Gallery.

On the floor downstairs, Peeters presents several large paintings - layered and patined as a result of her frequent overpainting – alongside smaller, more loosely painted works.

In Peeters’s oeuvre, rage competes with stillness, boldness with tristesse.

Her work balances between romantic scenes – a mountainous landscape, a lovers’ bed - and a more matter-of-fact stance.

When she loses herself in the former, she seeks a counterweight by painting something concrete: an invitation card, a personal ad, a floor plan, or a list of art collectors' names. In the room upstairs, Peeters shows her works on paper. These are colourful and, due to the use of olive oil, partly transparent, thus revealing her earlier drawings on the back side. It is as if Peeters wants to shrug off all heaviness.

By hiding and revealing, through frolic self-mockery and drama, Peeters gives us a lesson in painting.

Notes on some of the works in the exhibition:

Wachtende vrouw (naar George Minne)

George Minne (Ghent, 1866) made a captivating drawing titled Wachtende vrouw (Waiting woman).

Also Spilliaert, Picasso, Hopper and Ensor have painted waiting women: the fisherman’s wife waiting for het husband to return from the sea; the mother waiting for her son to come back from the front; the woman waiting for her lover.

Minne probably depicted his wife, waiting for her sons to come back from WW1.

She is only partly visible, peeking behind a door. Minne made several drawings of his waiting wife, in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1919.

Perhaps she is still waiting.

Champion Hill
This version of Waiting woman (after George Minne) was renamed to Champion Hill after I was informed that the 2 bedroom flat in London I had often stayed in was up to let. It was an Arts and Crafts house with a wood-panelled living room and original (non-working) art deco fireplaces.

I once saw foxes in the garden.

The Painting Lesson

This painting is based on an old invitation card for an exhibition of Giacometti sculptures at Julien Levy Gallery in New York.

The card lists the names of the sculptures in the show.

I overpainted the top part of the card and called the painting The Painting Lesson.

Rue de la femme-sans-tête. Which thought arose first? The thought of Baudelaire’s muse in her Rue de la femme- sans-tête apartment? Etta James singing Blind Girl at the Montreux festival? The brown women in my family tree? Manet’s smoking gypsy woman?

Or can one have three or four thoughts simultaneously?

Mourning Dog 1 Mourning Dog 2
It Read Dog/Clinging It Read Hearse/Dog

A dog with white and black-blue patches can be seen sitting or lying on a dark purple bed. The dog appears to be clinging to a body, recognisable only by its horizontal shape or pointed feet. Even the paint itself seems to cling and stick.

The horizontal forms in these paintings evoke catafalques, hearses, deathbeds, love beds, or landscapes in which loved ones may rest. What remains: possessions, souvenirs, the hollow in a pillow left by the weight of a head, a stuffed dog resting on violet cloth.

Lenders Leihgeber Prêteurs (Margo)

Margo is the first of my Lenders Leihgeber Preteurs paintings. It lists the names of Matisse collectors. There was some space left at the bottom right. I decided to write down a poem by Raymond Carver, Margo. To remind myself that I can go to places that are not even on a map.

Jacqueline Peeters

The Painting Lesson