Julie Calbert

Born in 1985, Julie Calbert lives and works in Brussels. 

A graduate in communication and photography, Julie Calbert has worked for the Belgian press and has been teaching photography for several years. She regularly collaborates with musicians and artists on the international scene. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions across Europe. In 2023, her work was commissioned and featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Contemporary Art in Belgian Luxembourg, the La Part du Feu Gallery in Brussels, and the DEUSS Gallery in Antwerp.

Through a practice that combines photography, prints, video, installation, publishing, and, more recently, the creation and modeling of virtual environments, Julie Calbert explores the relationships between memory, movement, the body, and the environment. She approaches photography like an alchemist, using various treatments and alterations that distill the image down to the point of its absence. Spectral silhouettes, fleeting and often feminine apparitions, and the resurgence of gestures and faces in the process of fading lend an abstract dimension to this work, which is both mental and embodied. In her installations, images intermingle with found or sculpted objects of rugged materiality (miniature landscapes, rocks, mountains, volcanoes…), creating a tension that contributes to the unexpected unfolding of sensory narratives. Her recent work tends toward an even more radical, quasi-landscape-like abstraction, in a gesture of pictorial refinement.