Karen Hendrickx is a multidisciplinary artist from Belgium. In addition to her individual work, she actively seeks collaboration with other artists, driven by a fascination with what emerges when disciplines intersect and reinforce each other. Since 2020, she has been working with Belgian dancer and choreographer Justine Copette on various projects exploring the boundaries between dance and visual art. Whether working in her studio or performing live on stage, Hendrickx always creates in the energy of the moment. Her creative process is intuitive and physical, stemming from a deep, inner need to express what words cannot capture. The result is a personal, emotional narrative without words, in which personal catharsis takes center stage. Once completed, she lets go of the work, free to live its own life. 

Technically speaking, Hendrickx often works with a dark, earthy color palette—brown, black, ochre, and gray—in which flashes of light occasionally break through, like a breath that balances hope and pain. Her working method is gestural, spontaneous, and physical. She often paints with the canvas on the floor and uses her entire body in the creative process, turning it into a kind of choreography on the canvas. In this way, she can literally draw energy from her entire body and transfer it to the canvas like a ball. At the same time, she can move around the work and keep it in constant balance. This physical way of working has been strongly influenced by her collaboration with Justine Copette. As with the abstract expressionists, the canvas becomes an arena for action. Her choice of materials is very diverse, ranging from oil paint, acrylic, charcoal, chalk, Chinese ink, and bistre, which she applies to various surfaces such as paper, canvas, and even Plexiglas.

Alongside her visual work, Hendrickx collaborates with Justine Copette on performances such as Sketches of Emotion (2020). In this performance, dancer and painter play off of one another, Hendrickx’s abstract paintings spontaneously created in the moment. The project later evolved into the workshop project 'Sketches of Emotion' centered on intuitive creation. She is currently further exploring this interdisciplinary approach in Liminal Harmony, a collaboration with Copette and musicians Peter Geysels and Peter De Koning, in which dance, image, and music merge into a single performative experience.

Hendrickx draws inspiration from the physical and performative approach of the Japanese Gutai group, choreographer Trisha Brown's exploration of fluid movements, and the intensity and gestural power of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell. These influences are reflected in her intuitive, physical process, in which painting becomes a choreography of the moment.