2026 Silhouettes, Celebrating 15 years

Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 Years, presented by Apartamento with works courtesy of Tim Van Laere Gallery Antwerp–Rome, marks 15 years of practice for the Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen, founded in 2011 by artists Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen. Rather than a retrospective, this exhibition is a reflection on the shared visual language of Muller Van Severen, one that has evolved into a clear and recognisable vocabulary for rethinking the everyday. At the heart of the presentation are 15 unique, human-size aluminium candleholders. Each form is an abstract reinterpretation of recurring motifs from Muller Van Severen’s oeuvre, alongside forms that emerged in the earlier individual practices of Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen: chairs, cabinets, lamps, vases, and sculptural structures.  Through rotation, inversion, or closure, these archetypes are reduced to their contours—to silhouettes that abandon their original function and emerge as autonomous signs in space. A large coloured candle crowns the top of each structure, introducing a temporal dimension. As the candle burns, the object undergoes a slow and irreversible transformation. Time thus operates as a sculptural, spatially designed material.

With this exhibition at Salon Del Mobile 2026 in Milan, Muller Van Severen is not marking a conclusion, but rather a pause, within an ongoing exploration of reduction, balance, and tension. Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 Years demonstrates how the familiar can shift without losing its essence—and how a form, once freed from function, can assume a new presence. Accompanying the exhibition is Apartamento’s monograph A Lot of Work, dedicated to Muller Van Severen, as well as Silhouettes, a limited series of candleholders drawn directly from the exhibition and developed in collaboration with BD Barcelona.