Pretty Ugly: The Deconstruction of Beauty

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This exhibition dismantles the seductive lie at the heart of Western beauty ideals—a lie that has reduced bodies to surfaces, gender to binary, and desire to a product. Pretty Ugly takes that mythology apart with a scalpel. It is not interested in flattering the eye, but in exposing how deeply beauty has been entangled with power, violence, and shame.

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Across paintings, sculptures, photographs, and self-portraits, twelve artists from eight countries unravel the aesthetics of conformity. They challenge the tyranny of symmetry, the fetish of whiteness, the commodification of the female form, and the erasure of marginalised bodies. Beauty, in this context, is not neutral—it is a battlefield shaped by social violence and internalised control.

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But this is not just a critique. It is also a reclamation. These artists reimagine beauty as unruly, emotional, grotesque, sacred, and alive. Their works speak to shame, to survival, to flesh and colour and contradiction. They suggest that ugliness is not the opposite of beauty—it’s part of it. It’s where truth lives when perfection fails.

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Pretty Ugly offers no clean answers, no new standard to replace the old. Instead, it invites us to look again—at ourselves, at others, at the histories written on our skin. In that deeper looking, beauty breaks free from its cage, returning to the wild terrain where it belongs.

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Artists:

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Ilke Cop - Ingrid Baars - Lisa Lapierre/Nour Beetch - Tales Frey - Mathieu V. Staelens - Mathias Vef 

Ana Cvorovic - Chloe Nicosia - Feryel Atek -  Lazarus Lazare - Nathan French - Nina van Denbempt

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