Galerie Eric Mouchet Brussels is pleased to present Under the Chandelier, the first solo exhibition in Belgium of Liza Sivakova (b. 1997, Russia), a painter working between Dresden and Paris.

Beneath the chandeliers of bourgeois living rooms, opulent dining rooms and hushed offices, Liza Sivakova’s paintings depict interiors where decorum quietly unravels: an elephant crashes into a dinner party, a man collapses beneath a table, a woman dances barefoot on a Persian rug while, around her, suited figures carry on their conversations as if nothing were happening. Under the Chandelier brings together a group of recent paintings, alongside pastels and collages, that explore, beneath a veneer of elegance and ceremony, the mechanisms through which power is staged, normalised, and passed on.

Trained at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, and later at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Liza Sivakova has spent the past several years developing a painting practice that investigates the visual mechanisms through which power is constructed, legitimised, and remembered. Combining archival imagery, found photographs, collage, and her own materials, she creates multilayered, transhistorical paintings in which historical realities and fiction converge, and in which identifiable historical figures appear alongside vividly coloured contemporary elements, allowing different temporalities to coexist within a single pictorial space.

Growing up in post-Soviet Russia, and witnessing the gradual consolidation of an authoritarian regime, profoundly shaped Sivakova’s artistic practice. Rather than depicting specific historical events, her paintings explore the visual strategies through which political authority is constructed, normalised, and sustained, and the ways these mechanisms permeate everyday life. Moving between personal experience and collective history, her work questions how ideology, patriarchal structures, and inherited images continue to shape contemporary society. Through recurring symbols, layered imagery, and deliberate shifts between monochrome and colour, her paintings resist linear narratives and instead invite multiple readings, blurring the boundaries between documentation, memory, and fiction.

In her own words, her artistic themes are rooted in her biography as a young woman in twenty-first-century Russia, with all the structural constraints and inner contradictions that entails. Her work addresses power relations, gender inequality, mental health, the overlooking of social vulnerabilities, and control exercised through authoritarian structures. Working with symbols, associations, and emotions, she seeks to create a dark, oppressive atmosphere in which ambiguous scenes emerge, aiming to provoke a sense of disorientation and unease.

Under the Chandelier brings together a group of the artist’s recent oil paintings. The Elephant in the room series (2026), which sets much of the exhibition’s tone, depicts the animal, incongruous and massive, bursting into hushed bourgeois interiors, whether a formal dinner, a bedroom, or an opulent salon, while the other figures appear entirely unbothered by its presence. Siesta (2026) and Feeding Time (2026) continue this tipping of the domestic scene into the uncanny, while Peace Treaty? III (2025), drawing on historical diplomatic iconography, questions the staging of power and state reconciliation. The two panels of Dancing Queen (2026) depict dancing figures caught in an almost unravelling motion, beneath the chandeliers and lanterns of ceremonial rooms, poised between ritual and loss of control.

The exhibition also presents a new body of pastels on paper mounted on wood alongside several paper collages made from archival photographs and worked over with tempera, in which Sivakova continues her ongoing work of recomposing the historical image. While oil painting forms the core of her practice, Sivakova also works with glazed ceramic tiles, extending her investigation of image-making and historical representation into other media and scales.

Sivakova’s work is held in the collections of the Städtische Galerie Dresden, the STRABAG Art Collection, and the Kunstsammlung des Bodenseekreises. She was selected for the Fresh A.I.R. Scholarship Programme of Stiftung Berliner Leben, received the Förderpreis des Bodenseekreises (2026) and the First Prize of the 47th Kunstpreis of the Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Karlsruhe (2024), and was shortlisted by the jury of the STRABAG Art Award in both 2024 and 2026. She also received the Emerging Artist Award from the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London (2022) and the Gold Medal of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts (2015).

Her work was the subject of an ARTE documentary in 2024 («Liza Sivakova und das Napoleon Phänomen»), as well as several features in the German press. Alongside her studio practice, she will teach painting at the 29th Dresden International Summer Academy for Visual Arts (riesa efau) in summer 2026. Recent exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim («Die ganze Zeit»), Motorenhalle Dresden («berühren[d]»), The Grass is Greener gallery in Leipzig («On the Other Side»), Schloss Britz in Berlin, as well as the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt in Munich and the Cour vitrée of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Galerie Eric Mouchet is pleased to present the very first solo exhibition of French artist Samir Mougas in its Brussels space. Entitled Hard Edge, Soft Core, the exhibition brings together sculptures, ceramics and paintings, and marks a significant milestone in the artist’s career: it is the first time these different practices are shown simultaneously, revealing in full the coherence of a visual language that is both rich and singular.

Born in 1980, Samir Mougas has spent over twenty years developing a sculptural practice driven by an insatiable curiosity for everyday objects and technological imaginaries. His work draws from a deliberately eclectic visual repertoire — electronic music, science fiction, car tuning, industrial design — to produce works that resist easy categorisation. Each series reflects a constant appetite for shifting techniques and registers, from industrial foundry to glazed ceramics, from moulding to acrylic painting, resin and AI-assisted image generation.

At the heart of the exhibition, the eponymous series Hard Edge Soft Core (2019) brings together over twenty stoneware sculptures: car hubcaps cast in ceramic and covered in intense, unexpected glazes. These objects play on a tension that is constitutive of Samir Mougas’s work: on one side, the formal rigour inherited from serial, functional design; on the other, a material that remains organic, handcrafted, ambiguous. By transposing these anonymous roadside objects into the field of sculpture, he grants them a new presence — at once familiar and radically displaced.

This ambivalence extends into the large recent sculptures from the exhibition Intelligences ambiantes (CACN, Nîmes, 2023–2024), several monumental pieces of which are presented in Brussels: A technologic food distribution machine with an articulated arm distributing blue sauce, Wall-mounted hyper-technologic food distribution system, Incredibly complex wall-mounted machine to braid very long sausages for starving people, and A wall-mounted machine with a lot of components to distribute green and blue food and meals. Generated from prompts submitted to AI tools and then translated into volume by the artist — resin, polystyrene, wood, acrylic paint — these imaginary machine-sculptures evoke the assembly line, the food processor and alimentary dystopia all at once. Neither functional nor entirely fictional, they embody what the artist calls «decommissioned objects»: forms that already carry within them the idea of ruin and of a possible world.

The exhibition also features a group of paintings on canvas and paper made in 2021, including the series Human Experience: Spam Factory and works such as Last Flash, Genetic District, Timecode, Alerte bleu and Formes englouties. These works, with compositions animated by geometric forms and coloured circles on gridded backgrounds, extend the same formal obsessions onto the pictorial plane: seriality, repetition, the tension between the systematic and the sensory. Shown for the first time alongside the ceramics and large sculptures, they reveal the deep coherence of a practice that moves freely between media without ever being confined to any one of them.

Samir Mougas has taught painting and ceramics at EESAB Quimper since 2017. His work is held in several public and private collections, and has been the subject of critical texts by Jill Gasparina, Claire Kueny, Guilhem Monceaux and Bertrand Riou, among others. He has been represented by Galerie Eric Mouchet Paris/Brussels since 2016.