Ghent's S.M.A.K. museum is giving Antwerp painter Bendt Eyckermans his first museum exhibition in Belgium. Titled 'The Passenger', the solo show opens with a preview on the evening of 30 October and runs from 31 October 2026 to 21 February 2027, gathering mainly recent work.

Eyckermans, born in Antwerp in 1994, builds narrative paintings out of the world immediately around him: objects from his studio, friends and acquaintances, and details noticed on the street. The results are dreamlike and quietly unsettling, with figures caught mid-gesture under stark lighting, their poses pushed just far enough to feel slightly exaggerated. He also borrows from photography and film, using their sense of movement to loosen what he sees as painting's fixed, static image.

At S.M.A.K., the show moves between interiors and street scenes. Scaffolding, marks on building facades, doors, tarpaulins and construction structures — things usually passed without a second thought — become carriers of memory and emblems of change in his work, shaping how a place, and the self, are experienced. Several spatial elements appear in the galleries, some of them taken directly from his paintings, so visitors step inside the world the pictures describe.

Alongside the paintings, the exhibition includes a substantial group of works on paper that open a window onto the artist's thinking, and a newly made video essay at the start of the show that immerses visitors in his universe. Eyckermans graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2016 and is known for a tactile, almost relief-like handling of paint, combining composition, colour and vivid figuration with references to the past and to personal experience.