TATJANA PIETERS is honoured to invite you to ‘Grace Grit Grin’, the third solo exhibition by Belgian artist Ilke Cop, alongside ‘[GUEST] curated by Ilke Cop’, a curated response by celebrated South African artist Kendell Geers. An intergenerational dialogue unfolds between two uncompromising voices in contemporary art, resulting in a charged exchange around the codes of art history, (female) embodiment , and the subversive power of play.
In ‘Grace Grit Grin’, Ilke Cop examines the internalisation of visual codes of femininity embedded in everyday objects. Damaged porcelain figurines of women, frozen in poses of mothers, caretakers, or lovers, are not restored but remade. Working from her own likeness, Cop sculpts grotesquely grinning heads that parody the polite smile historically demanded of women.
Through photography and the re-enactment of these poses, the artist translates them into painting. On canvas, the bodies appear almost too large for the frame—expansive and forceful, juxtaposed with the stone fragments of the sculptures. An intimate reflection on a turbulent period of fracture and stillness in the artist’s own life, Grace Grit Grin is an attempt to sublimate visceral experience into a transformative form.
Parallel to this exhibition, Kendell Geers presents a curated selection of new and historical works conceived as reply and counterpoint. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s dictum “a Guest + a Host = a Ghost,” Geers inhabits Cop’s exhibition as guest, echo, and spectral double. Geers breaks through the clean language of Minimalism in a play of linguistic and visual codes. In his paintings and photographs of severed flowers, the element of rupture reveals the fragility of beauty and the violence beneath it. His Idols sculptures — objects wrapped in red-and-white emergency tape — redefine entrenched colonial frameworks.
Together, the two exhibitions propose Grace (aesthetics), Grit (resistance) and Grin (humour) as vital and unstable forces within an artists practice. Cop and Geers explore how art continually transforms consciousness by challenging our inherited structures of understanding.
Ilke Cop (b. 1988, Belgium) lives and works in Brussels. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, she explores representations of femininity and power. In 2024 she received the Gaver Prize for painting, in the same year her work has been included in the Biennial for Painting in Belgium (Mudel, Deinze). Key solo exhibitions include Hardcore/Softspore at Tatjana Pieters (2024) and Folded : Whites in Pilar (2022). In 2024 Cop presented a first overview of her work in Once in a Blue Shroom at Be-Part. Cop has been shown internationally, including her New York debut with Jane Lombard Gallery (Independent, 2025). Her work is part of private and public collections in Europe and the United States.
Kendell Geers (b. 1968, South Africa) lives and works in Brussels. Describing himself as an AniMystikAktivist, his work merges diverse traditions, from Animism and Activism to Alchemy, Mysticism, and Ritual Magick. His uncompromising strategies stem from a core belief that “Art changes the world — one perception at a time.” In 2007, Geers presented his first major retrospective titled IRRESPEKTIV at S.M.A.K., Ghent. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Taipei, Istanbul, Lyon, Johannesburg, Havana, São Paulo, Moscow, and Venice Biennales, as well as at Documenta and the Carnegie International. His works are in prominent private and public collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, Vanhaerents Art Collection, BPS22, Middelheim Museum, and S.M.A.K.
