Michael Borremans, Horse Hunting

Belgian filmmaker and painter Michaël Borremans (born 1963) has made a name for himself over the past two decades, though his figurative portraiture and pastoral scenes, indebted as they are to Manet, Degas and Velázquez, look of another time, the traditional Baroque and Rococo-esque style rendering the work unsettlingly familiar.
Michaël Borremans: Horse Hunting, published on the occasion of the artist's second solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2006, is devoted to the 14 new paintings on view, among them the eponymous "Horse Hunting" (2005), which portrays a young man, fashionably attired, holding two twigs from each of his nostrils. Rendered in a palette of diffused, shadowy browns, oranges and grays, Borremans' work can be characterized by its lustrous surface and eerie exploration of mental states through the careful release and withholding of visual clues. This catalogue includes a text by Belgian artist and curator Hans van Heirseele.