Nel Aerts (born 1987 in Antwerp, lives there) studied free art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent. She presented her artistic work in solo exhibitions at the Museum M in Leuven, the Horizont Gallery in Budapest and the Kunsthalle Charlottenburg in Copenhagen, as well as in group exhibitions at the Muhka, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo and the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau.
Nel Aerts works in the fields of performance, painting and drawing – her works are characterized by many installative elements and figurative parts that make it possible to identify and trace fine human emotions in her works.
The art of Nel Aerts characterizes an intermedial and a (semi-)iconic handling of materials and media. She also observes how the artist’s position is misrepresented by the world. In her drawings, images that look like out-of-control woodcuts, performative videos and sculptural installations, she uses a mixture of tragedy, poetry, fiction, humour and art historical references to question how different media, artistic vocation and the world behave. Humour, loneliness, sadness, taboo, escapism, the journey, the boat trip, optimism, the mask/mask art – all these are elements that recur in her paintings, collages, sculptures and actions. At the same time, her practice and work also bear witness to a stubborn belief in the creative, material and mobile forces of contemporary art.
The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Lingen is being staged in close cooperation with the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster – both presentations complement each other in form and content and form the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
Opening at the Kunsthalle Lingen on Saturday, 09 March 2009 at 7 pm.
Opening at the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster on Friday, 8 March 2019 at 7 pm.

Kindly supported by the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, the district of Emsland, the city of Lingen (Ems), and the Kulturstiftung Heinrich Kampmann