A contemporary artist exploring memory and purpose through layered, precise imagery
Gerda Van Damme is a Belgian visual artist working across painting, installation, video, and digital media, whose practice explores the layered territories of memory, perception, and the unseen. Her work investigates how images carry traces of lived experience—how they fracture, persist, and reassemble across time. Through subtle distortions, archival references, and a precise yet poetic visual language, Van Damme creates works that oscillate between observation and reconstruction, inviting viewers into a space where the familiar becomes quietly estranged.
Van Damme works within shifting landscapes—geographical, emotional, and mnemonic. This duality informs her sensitivity to the quiet intensities of the everyday: the overlooked, the peripheral, the nearly‑forgotten.
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Belgian artist with works exhibited and collected internationally
Gerda Van Damme's work has been exhibited internationally in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States, including presentations at the Arsenale in Venice (Arte Laguna Prize, twice), HB55 Kunstfabrik in Berlin, the Undo Arts Center in Brooklyn, MECA Mediterráneo Centro Artístico in Almería,the Palacio de Viana in Cordoba, WG Gallery in Dordrecht, and multiple Belgian cultural institutions. She has been selected as a finalist for major juried competitions such as the Arte Laguna Prize, the Biennale de l'Art Pierre Paulus, the Prix des Arts Plastiques et Visuels du Waux‑hall, the MiniARTures International Contest, and the Prix de la Peinture de Woluwe Saint‑Pierre. In 2025, she received the Audience Prize and Jury Mention at the Prix des Arts Plastiques et Visuels du Waux‑hall.
Her practice has been supported by grants from the Fédération Wallonie‑Bruxelles, the Province of Hainaut, the City of Charleroi, and the Eden Cultural Center, notably for her work with the artists' collective and for the curation of contemporary art projects such as La Cellule and Grand Ecart.
Her works are held in private collections in Belgium, Spain, Germany, France, Dubai and the United States.
Others about Gerda Van Damme
Flavio Scaloni, Galerie Lo Scalo, Brussels:
“The greatest strength of her work lies in its psychological depth and in her ability to transform the intimate into something universal. Her exploration of memory, childhood, and the passage of time carefully avoids decorative nostalgia, instead venturing into more unsettling and existential territories. The series The Way We Were is particularly powerful, as it reinterprets the family archive with critical distance and a palpable emotional charge. Her works are not mere images, but reflections on the human condition. Her technical mastery of oil on linen and wood demonstrates a high level of academic precision in the service of a contemporary aesthetic.”
Rossi Charmoli, owner and director of Charmoli Ciarmoli, New York:
“Her traditional technical approach to painting, with an impressionistic touch, is combined with a use of light that gives the compositions an unsettling quality, almost like fragments of imagination or distant memories. Her treatment of the subject and the scene is particularly effective, guiding the viewer’s gaze immediately to the exact point where she wants it to be.”
Francisco Bautista Toledo, journalist for El Independiente de Granada:
“Gerda Van Damme surprises with the work she presents—excellent in its execution, an aesthetic reordering of realism that transforms it into visual denunciation, a direct discourse on individual freedom subjected to imposed social norms, expressed through works of remarkable perfection.”
