Karen Hendrickx (1984) is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium. Alongside her autonomous visual practice, she collaborates intensively with other artists, driven by a fascination with what emerges when disciplines intersect and reinforce one another. 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, investigating how these disciplines can merge into a new, shared language. This collaboration gave rise to Sketches of Emotion, a live dialogue between dancer and painter in which artworks emerge through 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, allowing dance, visual art, and music to merge in real time.

Whether working in her studio or performing live on stage, Hendrickx creates in the energy of the moment, guided by a deeply rooted intuition and a physical intensity that remains palpable in the work. Her works are created without a predetermined plan, arising instead from an inner necessity to capture what resists verbal expression. Each piece functions as a visual translation of her inner world—her experiences, emotions, and intuition. In her abstract visual language, line, color, and material merge into expressive traces of movement, where imperfections and chance form the core of the work’s strength and authenticity. Using a dark, earthy color palette of browns, greens, blues, and reds, interspersed with light accents that balance between hope and pain, she creates works that seem to transcend their frame and extend into space. By placing the canvas on the floor and engaging her entire body in the painting process, painting becomes a form of choreography in which physical energy is directly transferred onto the canvas. The viewer is invited to lose themselves in this tension and to open up to what cannot be clearly defined.

A defining characteristic of Karen Hendrickx’s practice is a continuous drive to experiment and to push boundaries. In her performances, not only do the borders between disciplines blur, but so do those between roles: dance, music, and visual art flow together into a single embodied experience. In her autonomous work as well, she investigates the tensions between pain and beauty, chaos and order, and between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.

Hendrickx deliberately works with materials and supports that already carry traces. The canvas functions as a memory surface in which past and present converge. The visible marks 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 unfolded in the moment: a meeting place between memory and presence, where the process itself remains perceptible beneath the surface.