CURA.

The first major retrospective at M Leuven dedicated to Sigefride Bruna Hautman gathers a range of artworks spanning over four decades of practice, and marks the first comprehensive overview of the artist’s sculptural cosmology. This long-overdue exhibition, curated by Valerie Verhack, maps a terrain where objects speak through their poetic essence and unique compositions achieve totemic portraitures of our time.

Existing literature on Hautman is scarce, but the exhibition’s unfolding reveals a practice defined by a persistent and eclectic personalisation of disciplinary boundaries. Her education at the Antwerp Academy, for instance, whose emphasis on classical sculpture is deliberately and playfully crossed. Emblematic of such ethos is the sculptural installation Institutionalized Dignity (1982, rebuilt in 2025), in which polyester, leather, and wood coalesce into a theatrical setting of ideological critique as two leather figures hunch beneath an eagle’s omnipresent gaze. The eagle, a traditional universal emblem of freedom, power and dignity, has also historically been appropriated by Western ideals; it is the official symbol of the United States of America, recognised as the “National Bird” and featured prominently in national currency, flags, and government buildings. The bust of the animal in Hautman’s installation—with its bright colours and kitsch notes—seemingly draws from both its symbolism within indigenous cosmologies and its instrumentalisation by power structures. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the wings are omitted—clipped, even. The submissive posture of the two figures sitting below, combined with the modular, retro-futuristic furniture on which they sit, evokes a paradox of control and compliance—a mise-en-scène in which ideological forces are quietly internalised through strategy and design. This layering of cross-cultural references and symbolic tensions recurs across the show. Another example is Moonproject 1: Rumours (1981), inspired by a line from David Bowie’s song “Love You Till Tuesday” (1967), which anchors a series of six sculptural pieces (five shown here). Here, the moon becomes a cypher for transformation and cyclical renewal, while its evolving symbolic status from celestial mystery to colonial conquest is subtly put forward.

Interestingly, many of Hautman’s sculptures borrow visual cues from interior design—modular furniture, gridded layouts, decorative finishes—raising questions about the domestication of ideology and how power materialises in everyday environments. Moreover, animals in Hautman’s work are often rendered with hyperrealistic detail, while human figures remain abstract, schematically depicted, or barely formed as portraiture is radically reconfigured. Works like Portrait 1 (Father) (1990) and Portrait 5 (Yvon 2) (1990) evoke identity through assemblage rather than resemblance, where the composition is metaphysical and austere, distilling biography into objecthood. The former portrays Hautman’s father through objects that refer to his life—a bridge, a ship-in-a-bottle, referencing the shipyard in Temse. In the latter, two vessels are depicted pouring liquid into one another, capturing the generative reciprocity of parenting and pondering on the flow of values, care, and memory—or identity as a continuous exchange. Across these works, the totemic operates conceptually, allowing Hautman’s sculptures to become containers of remembrance, where each material serves as a transmitter of emotional conductivity.

Hautman’s practice moves between metaphysical speculation and domestic intimacy, without privileging one over the other. Her visual language is modest yet surgical, and silence becomes syntax—each pause between materials and forms as charged as the objects themselves. That’s perhaps why Hautman’s works are understood and framed in the show as visual poems. Among the most recent productions, Voile (2024) echoes the structure of Institutionalized Dignity, presenting a wall-based work that projects sculpturally into the room. A gutter-like bucket emerges from a dotted, multicoloured canvas, functioning as a prism that generates radiating threads of colour. These lines seem to form the skeleton of a translucent tent of pink organza, where three loosely defined young figures find shelter. The veil, embroidered with the phrase “Form explores the edge of thought,” positions the work as a map of introspection—a meditation on the tension between fixity and flow, also well conveyed by the teenage of the three figures and the playful character of this work. The piece functions as both a portal and an index of Hautman’s broader cosmology. Overall, the exhibition at M Leuven opens a symbolic landscape where memory, identity, and emotion are rendered in an idiosyncratic language of objects. Unique and universal at the same time, Hautman’s vocabulary is deeply personal, yet it speaks to shared conditions of existence.