Like a gesture repeated across centuries—at once inherited and newly formed—Newchild presents As Old as Time, As New as Breath, a group exhibition bringing together new works by Madeleine Bialke, Cheung Tsz Hin, Adriaan Marin, Chris Oh, and Andrew Sendor. Conceived for Art Brussels, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on recurrence and renewal, tracing how the most enduring conditions of human experience—displacement, belief, imagination, memory—are continuously rearticulated in the present.
At a moment marked by instability and acceleration, the exhibition resists both rupture and nostalgia. Instead, it proposes a more nuanced temporality: one in which the past is neither distant nor resolved, but persists as an active material—reshaped, refracted, and made visible through contemporary practice. Across painting and assemblage, each artist engages with inherited visual languages and lived realities, offering works that oscillate between intimacy and monumentality, clarity and ambiguity, stillness and unrest.
Madeleine Bialke presents a series of expansive, atmospheric landscapes that evoke terrains both discovered and remembered. Her compositions, shaped by her transatlantic movement from the United States to the United Kingdom, operate as quiet reflections on migration, environmental precarity, and the psychological weight of place. These works resist fixed geography, instead unfolding as mutable fields where political and ecological anxieties are absorbed into a language of painterly restraint and spatial openness.
Working in close proximity to Brussels, Adriaan Marin develops densely textured canvases populated by figures that appear both familiar and indeterminate. His compositions move fluidly between registers of devotion, autobiography, and collective memory, creating a visual syntax that feels at once archaic and immediate. Marin’s work channels a restless energy—oscillating between reverence and fragmentation—while subtly echoing the dissonances of contemporary life, where identity is increasingly mediated, dispersed, and reconstructed.
In contrast, Andrew Sendor offers a contemplative body of meticulous paintings that extend his ongoing investigation into perception and narrative. These works operate less as representations of the natural world than as meditative thresholds—spaces in which the boundaries between observation, memory, and imagination dissolve. Through layered surfaces and shifting tonalities, Sendor constructs environments that invite a slower form of looking, foregrounding the generative capacity of the mind to shape, distort, and inhabit its own realities.
Cheung Tsz Hin contributes a suite of poetic paintings that navigate the complexities of territory, identity, and historical transformation. Rooted in his experience in Hong Kong, his work approaches these themes with a measured subtlety, privileging atmosphere and suggestion over direct articulation. His compositions hold a quiet tension—where personal and collective histories converge, and where the shifting contours of place are rendered through a delicate, introspective visual language.
Finally, Chris Oh engages with the continuity of art historical forms, drawing from Renaissance aesthetics while reconfiguring them through contemporary materials and sensibilities. His works, often incorporating found elements such as shells and readymade objects, establish a dialogue between past and present that is both playful and incisive. In doing so, Oh foregrounds the enduring resonance of classical ideals—beauty, mortality, transcendence—while questioning their relevance within the conditions of the present.
Together, the exhibition proposes a space in which time is neither linear nor stable, but folded, recursive, and alive. These works do not seek resolution; rather, they hold open a field of inquiry—one in which the oldest human concerns continue to surface, newly inflected, within the shifting realities of contemporary life.
