Karen Hendrickx is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium. In addition to her autonomous visual work, she collaborates intensively with other artists, driven by a fascination for the cross-pollination of disciplines. Since 2020, she has formed an artistic duo with choreographer and dancer Justine Copette. Together, they explore the boundary between dance and visual art in performative projects, where both disciplines merge into a new, shared language. Their collaboration gave rise to Sketches of Emotion, a live dialogue between dancer and painter in which artworks emerge from movement, physicality, and mutual influence. This interdisciplinary exploration is further developed in Liminal Harmony, a performance in which Hendrickx and Copette collaborate with musicians Peter Geysels and Peter De Koning, bringing dance, visual art, and music together in real time.

Whether working in her studio or live on stage, Hendrickx always creates in the energy of the moment, guided by a deep-rooted intuition and physical intensity that remains palpable in her work. Her pieces emerge without a predetermined plan, driven instead by an inner necessity to capture what is difficult to express in words. Each work serves as a visual translation of her inner world, experiences, emotions, and intuition. In her abstract visual language, line, color, and material merge into expressive traces of movement, with imperfections and chance forming the core of the work’s power and authenticity. Using a dark, earthy palette of browns, greens, blues, and reds, punctuated with light accents that balance between hope and pain, she creates pieces that seem to transcend their frame and extend into space. By placing the canvas on the floor and involving her whole body in the painting process, the act of painting becomes a form of choreography, where physical energy is directly transferred onto the canvas. The viewer is invited to lose themselves in this tension and open up to what cannot be easily defined.

A defining feature of Karen Hendrickx’s practice is a continuous drive to experiment and push boundaries. In her performances, not only do the lines between disciplines blur, but also those between roles: dance, music, and visual art merge into a single, embodied experience. Even in her autonomous work, she explores the tensions between pain and beauty, chaos and order, and the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.

Hendrickx deliberately works on surfaces that already bear traces of paint or other materials. The canvas functions as a memory, where past and present converge. The visible traces of movement and gesture, created during performances or in the studio, tell a layered story in which each action adds meaning. The final work becomes a quiet reflection of what occurred in the moment: a meeting place between memory and presence, where the process itself remains palpable beneath the surface.