Michel Rein
Sophie Whettnall , Belgium
"Invisible"
Sophie Whettnall, Invisible landscape, 2025, soie perforée, cadre cuivre, 51,5 x 40 x 3,5 cm, Photo © Isabelle Arthuis, Courtesy of the artist and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels
Michel Rein is pleased to present InVisible, the sixth solo exhibition of Sophie Whettnall at the gallery.
Sophie Whettnall’s practice, which combines video, drawing, performance, and installation, revolves around an ongoing exploration of light, its appearances, absences, and movements. Her works, both sensitive and powerful, take form through physical, repetitive, and meditative gestures, where time becomes matter.
With InVisible, the artist continues this reflection on what eludes the gaze, what is no longer seen or rarely noticed.
The exhibition creates a tension between presence and erasure, questioning the mechanisms of hyper-visibility in contemporary societies. It is an attempt to resist noise with silence, spectacle with restraint.
D’une rive, l’autre opens the exhibition with a sculpture created in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, along the Seine. Inspired by the landscape visible from the opposite bank—close yet inaccessible—the work results from a dialogue between public and private space. It creates a space within a space, allowing for contemplation or a revisit of the landscape. In this piece, Sophie Whettnall balances the monumental and the everyday, the intimate and the transparent: a fertile opposition where magic happens.
This tension between direct perception and withdrawal continues in a series of works on satin—Invisible & Shifting Landscape. Since 2022, Sophie Whettnall has been using this fluid, reflective, and elusive fabric, which is also associated with the feminine. She prints discreet, almost ghostly forms onto it. By playing with shadows and reflections, the artist questions the invisibilization of women, their gestures, and their memories. These works reveal as much as they conceal, inviting a sensitive attention, echoing the themes of disappearance and appearance that run throughout the exhibition.
This intimate relationship with landscape takes sculptural form in Layer Cake. Each sculpture combines a stool, a pedestal, a copper plate, and a Fontainebleau rock painted with India ink. These compositions, like a forest of stones, evoke nature contained within the exhibition space. The sculptures converse with a Japanese landscape aesthetic based on careful observation, slowness, and the layering of forms and materials. The confrontation between nature’s time and exhibition time is tangible here, in these stratified objects where each layer carries a memory, a gesture, a tension. This logic of layers and lines directly resonates with the Plaster Landscape series displayed upstairs in the gallery.
There, Sophie Whettnall creates abstract topographies from torn paper, forming mental landscapes traversed by memory, erosion, and perception. These works demonstrate the same attention to material, to fragments, and to the slow development of forms, where the invisible emerges in the interstices of the paper.
This exploration unfolds on a much larger scale in Ratrack Project, a diptych video installation. Created during a residency at the 3D Foundation in Verbier, the work stages a monumental and ephemeral drawing traced in the snow using a snowcat, whose original purpose was subverted to create this performance. This landscape-scale drawing engages not only the mountainside as a support but also involves mountain workers who participated in the act. A bond was formed through this collaboration. The result, partially uncontrollable, exists on the boundary of the visible, between mastery and chance. The landscape becomes a living archive—fragile, ephemeral.
Born in 1973, Sophie Whettnall lives and works in Brussels. Winner of the Belgian Art Prize in 1999, her work has been exhibited notably at the 52nd Venice Biennale, at MAC’S Grand Hornu, BOZAR and La Centrale (Brussels), Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City), Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence), CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (Brazil), COAC (Barcelona), STUK (Leuven), Chiostri di San Pietro, and La Fondazione Palazzo Magnani (Reggio Emilia), as well as at TANK (Shanghai, Wiels Selection). Her works are part of numerous public and private collections, both in Belgium and internationally.
Solo show of Sophie Whettnall
From May 22nd to July 26th, 2025
The gallery
Michel Rein was founded in 1992 in Tours, then moved to Paris in 2000. Since 2013, we have a second space in Brussels.
The Gallery has long-term partnerships with emerging and established artists, French and international.
We are focused on artists who question the contemporary world in a poetic way. Ecological, minorities or historical issues are at the heart of our commitment.
Most of our artists participated to major international events. Our gallery is a partner to International museums and private/public collections worldwide.
We are participating for thirty years to international art fairs (Art Basel, Art Basel Paris, Art Brussels, Art Genève, Miart, ARCO, The Armory show,…)
Gallery artists
Maria Thereza Alves, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Sébastien Bonin, Mariana Bunimov, A.K. Burns, Michele Ciacciofera, Jordi Colomer, Abigail DeVille, Jimmie Durham, Didier Fiúza Faustino, Dora García, Apóstolos Georgíou, Piero Gilardi, Mathew Hale, Christian Hidaka, Jean-Charles Hue, Armand Jalut, Ariane Loze, Didier Marcel, Stefan Nikolaev, Dan Perjovschi, Frank Perrin, Elisa Pône, Mark Raidpere, Enrique Ramírez, Michael Riedel, Hugo Ruyant, Edgar Sarin, Anne-Marie Schneider, Franck Scurti, Allan Sekula, Marinella Senatore, Agnès Thurnauer, Luca Vitone, Sophie Whettnall
Galerie sélectionnée par Audrey Guttman
