Emilie Terlinden (b. 1983, Brussels, Belgium) is a visual artist whose painting practice draws inspiration from Flemish masters, exploring the interplay between abstraction and still life. Holding a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (2018), her work weaves elements of Renaissance imagery and everyday objects into intricate, baroque-inspired compositions. Terlinden's work is held in the prestigious Belfius Art Collection, alongside numerous private collections. She has exhibited at galleries such as DMW Gallery in Antwerp, Galerie DYS in Brussels, and Gomulan Gallery in Amsterdam, and has participated in notable art fairs, including Art Antwerp and Art Rotterdam. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Kanal Centre Pompidou in Brussels, the Ianchelevici Museum in La Louvière, and Oppenheim Palace in Cologne. Her accolades include the Laurent Moonens Art Prize (2018), a special mention for the Jos Albert Art Prize (2020), and selections for the Jean and Irène Ransy Art Prize (2017 and 2020), along with multiple nominations for distinguished art awards. Based in Brussels, she continues to merge historical influences with contemporary aesthetics in her innovative approach to painting.

Émilie Terlinden is an artist who folds, unfolds, cuts, assembles, and paints. Each of her works stages elements meticulously selected from a vast library spanning from the Renaissance to everyday objects, composed into baroque and phantasmagorical arrangements where abstraction flirts with still life.
Drawing from these image fragments, the artist—who describes herself as having “a taste for Dutch detail rather than Italian flesh”—constructs her paintings to offer a poetic and uncanny mystification of reality. Through various manipulations—folding, cutting, and assembling—these illustrations are transformed, stripped of their original context, and repurposed as pictorial materials. The act of painting then completes their metamorphosis, definitively asserting the work as a painting in its own right.
Despite their manipulation, these images do not entirely lose their identity and remain recognizable, allowing each composition to invite multiple interpretations.
This complex working method, reminiscent of cinematic montage and close-up techniques, makes time itself a significant factor in Émilie Terlinden’s process. The slow pace of creation and assembly mirrors the temporal journey offered by the artist through her selection of assembled images.
Each work bears witness to a whirling aesthetic beloved in Baroque art, paired with the rigor of austere modern abstraction, which disorients the viewer's gaze. They no longer know whether they are facing a vegetal, mineral, or conceptual world—a flower, an organ, a machine, or a chimera.

Isabelle Pouget