Hetzler Marfa presents Rinus Van de Velde’s ‘The Dinner’
Over the past 15 years, Rinus Van de Velde has been composing what he calls a “fictional autobiography,” a life imagined into existence rather than lived. Through a practice spanning drawing, painting, installation, sculpture and video work, he leverages imagined memories, snippets of conversation never shared.
The Dinner, a solo exhibition of new works by Van de Velde opens at Hetzler Marfa on Sunday, May 24. The show constitutes a new chapter of this fictional autobiography, presenting an invitation to an imaginary dinner suspended in anticipation, animated by the subtle choreography of who may—and may not—attend. The intimately rendered scenes are both humorous and self-reflexive.
“If you think about where encounters happen or where you meet people at my age, it’s almost always centered around the idea of a dinner,” Van de Velde says. “The setting of the dinner feels both specific and undefined. Somewhere remote, almost dreamlike. This is inspired by the location of the exhibition itself in Marfa.” Displaying a wide range of media—30 oil pastels on paper, eight cardboard sculptures and three charcoal paintings, as well as two films screening in the gallery’s studio space—the exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of his work in the U.S. to date. Van de Velde last exhibited in the U.S. in 2012 at Patrick Painter Inc. in Santa Monica; this marks his fourth solo exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler since 2023.
Born in 1983, Van de Velde lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. The salon-style installation of the new works reflects his narrative approach to image-making, one deeply informed by Belgium’s rich comic-strip tradition. Known as the “Ninth Art,” comics are woven into the country’s cultural history, which boasts more comic-strip artists per square kilometer than any other nation.
The largest work in the exhibition, Bill, Bob, Alice, … (2025), a charcoal painting mounted in two parts, references the iconic courtroom scene in The Godfather Part II, in which Michael Corleone testifies. Recast as a bastardized self-portrait, the artist’s own face appears on trial amid a slew of fictional onlookers, many drawn from across art history. This particular, surreal gathering, existing nowhere, serves as a central theme of the exhibition, with the gallery dinner evoking an experience emblematic of the art world and not unlike standing trial. The works conjure a fictional place that very well could be real; conversely, Marfa itself exists as a nonfictional place that might just as easily have emerged from an artist’s imagination.
Handwritten text beneath each of the works serves as autobiographical prose, kindred to diary entries or daydreamlike notes, and, in some instances, incantations invoking artists both living and deceased. References to Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Alfred Wallis, and—most directly in the painting Hurry up, Richard! …—American painter Richard Diebenkorn bespatter the work. Fictional conversations with Alfred Wallis, Norbert Schwontowski, Albert Oehlen and David Hockney take place. Believing himself an “armchair voyager,” Van de Velde evokes mental journeys and fantasies: his dream studio, an idealised home and a short-lived aspiration to become a pianist.
In Everything that remains will be unintended sculptures. (2025), the remnants of a party are arranged across an unmanned table, with no chairs or guests in sight. As the title suggests, drawn from text underlining the pastel image, the table itself becomes an “unintended sculpture.” Similarly, his cardboard work The dinner (2025) presents a vacant table awaiting the arrival of guests, perpetuating feelings of longing and anticipation.
Two films—Life in a Day (17 mins) and La Ruta Natural (13 mins)—will be screened on a loop on alternating days within the gallery’s studio space as part of the exhibition. Both works are composed entirely of hand-built props and were filmed in Van de Velde’s studio. A number of the cardboard sculptures presented in the show act as miniature versions of the life-size sculptures he creates as props for his films, which utilize cardboard, wood, and papier-mâché. In action they exist in a state that is both hyperreal and imagined, as the camera follows the artist’s alter ego, portrayed by a studio assistant wearing a mask of his own face, endlessly traipsing through a dreamlike world, trying on paper socks, crawling inside a cactus stalk like a gargantuan paper doll or emerging from an underground archive. Such capacious worldbuilding produces a disassociative effect, with the films resonating as one part depersonalization study, one part journey through an open-mouthed dream. The artist is currently working on his fourth film, which is expected to be completed around 2028-2029.
Through such voyages, paired with fictional conversations with imagined guests unfolding in a conceptual nowhere that echoes the isolation of Marfa’s surroundings, Van de Velde extends an invitation to enter a world very much his own—one that belongs to all who dare accept.
The opening will take place on Sunday, May 24 from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m and is free and open to the public. The show will remain on view at Hetzler Marfa through December 6, 2026.