Zio Ziegler’s Reverse Paintings at Almine Rech Brussels
his autumn, Brussels welcomes Zio Ziegler for his second solo exhibition with Almine Rech, titled Reverse Paintings. Running from 12 September to 2 November 2024, the exhibition presents a striking evolution in Ziegler’s practice — moving from dense, maximalist compositions toward works defined by reduction, restraint, and process.
Rather than presenting painting as image-making, Reverse Paintings positions it as excavation: a layered process of construction and removal where what remains is often what has been stripped away.
This is Ziegler at his most controlled, but also his most revealing.
Exhibition Details
Artist: Zio Ziegler
Exhibition: Reverse Paintings
Venue: Almine Rech, Brussels
Dates: 12 September – 2 November 2024
Medium: Oil and acrylic on canvas
What to Expect: Layers of Construction and Removal
Upon entering the exhibition, viewers are met with works that feel both built and dismantled.
Ziegler’s Reverse Paintings begin with dense accumulations of oil paint, gesture, and layered motifs. These surfaces are then partially removed, scraped back, or obscured — revealing compositions that feel exposed rather than finished.
What emerges is not simplicity, but residue.
Each work carries traces of its own history: earlier marks, buried gestures, and decisions that remain visible beneath the surface. The paintings feel less like images and more like records of time passing through material.
This process mirrors Ziegler’s broader shift — away from immediacy and toward reflection.
The Artist’s Approach: Painting as Process
Ziegler describes the work not as an endpoint, but as something that unfolds.
“I’m not going after an end result, but after a process that might crystallize in a moment,” he explains.
That philosophy sits at the centre of Reverse Paintings. The works resist fixed meaning, instead prioritising transformation — where painting becomes a negotiation between control and release.
In this sense, the exhibition positions Ziegler within a wider contemporary conversation around process-based abstraction, where making is as important as what is made.v
Center Of Gravity, 2023
Oil and acrylic on canvas
187.33 x 187.33 x 6.35 cm, 73 3/4 x 73
3/4 x 2 1/2 in
© Zio Ziegler
Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo: Dan Bradica
Reduction, Time and Artistic Influence
At the core of the exhibition is the idea of reduction.
Layers of paint accumulate like sediment before being partially removed, leaving behind structures that feel architectural rather than illustrative.
There are subtle echoes of modernist abstraction throughout the work, including references to artists such as Piet Mondrian, but filtered through a contemporary approach rooted in gesture and physical process rather than geometric purity.
What matters here is not perfection, but tension — between what is added and what is taken away.
A Shift in Zio Ziegler’s Practice
Reverse Paintings marks a clear departure from Ziegler’s earlier maximalist visual language.
Where previous works leaned into density, symbolism, and visual overload, this exhibition introduces restraint as a central principle.
The result is a body of work that feels slower, more deliberate, and more materially aware — where surface and absence are equally important.
It reflects a broader evolution in his practice: a movement from expression toward reflection.
Why This Exhibition Matters
Presented at Almine Rech Brussels, Reverse Paintings sits within a wider institutional context that frames Ziegler’s work within contemporary European painting discourse.
It also reflects a broader shift in contemporary art practice toward material investigation, where process, erosion, and repetition become central to meaning.
Rather than offering resolution, the exhibition invites viewers to sit with ambiguity — to read painting not as image, but as time made visible.
Final Word
Reverse Paintings is not an exhibition that presents answers.
Instead, it reveals the act of painting as something unstable — built through accumulation, undone through removal, and ultimately defined by what cannot be fully resolved.
In stripping back his own visual language, Zio Ziegler exposes something more essential underneath: the process itself.