Belgian gallery Office Baroque will close after 17 years in business. The tastemaking Antwerp-based gallery, founded in 2007 by Wim Peeters and Marie Denkens, announced that it will shut its doors on September 15th following its final show, a group exhibition titled “What Men Live By.”
“With an idiosyncratic, experimental approach, Office Baroque occupied an art world niche in Antwerp and Brussels, away from the buzz of large art capitals,” the founders wrote on their website. “It became a home for some of the most inspiring and diverse voices of our time to exhibit and find their ways into leading institutions, collections, publications, and fairs across the globe. We had set no expiry date, and saying goodbye to an organization that, against all odds, has programmed over 100 exhibitions and participated in leading fairs for more than 17 years, is bittersweet.”
In 2007, Office Baroque opened in a modernist apartment in Antwerp, where the curators staged exhibitions featuring artists such as Owen Land, Matthew Brannon, and Leslie Hewitt, among others. By 2008, the gallery moved into its first storefront in Antwerp’s diamond district. During these early years, the gallery participated in art fairs including Frieze London and Liste Basel, giving it the opportunity to reach international audiences.
Peeters and Denkens moved the gallery to Brussels in November 2013, inaugurating the new location with a solo exhibition from French American photographer Michel Auder. They established a second space in the city in 2015. Over the next decade, the gallery presented exhibitions from rapidly rising artists, including Terence Koh, Mathew Cerletty, and Sophie von Hellermann. Office Baroque moved back to Antwerp in 2022, setting up shop in a former gym.
In an open letter posted on the gallery’s website, Peeters and Denken emphasized the mounting pressures experienced by mid-level galleries across the market.
“Being signed up by a mega-gallery may have become the new holy grail of careers, for artists, gallery staff, and even for gallery owners,” they wrote. “At the very heart of the system, severe misuse of power continues to accompany admission into almost every segment of the art world, both for galleries and artists. A fix-all solution for many galleries remains to expand, in the hopes of interconnecting gallery growth, with spikes in represented artists’ careers, often until the very point of losing.”
Office Baroque joins a slate of mid-size galleries that have shuttered in recent months. In New York, several tastemaking galleries, including Tribeca’s David Lewis and Chelsea’s Cheim & Read, shut their doors in the last year.
