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The Hole is pleased to present Clownette a solo exhibition by Charline Tyberghein. Continuing Belgium's lineage of Surrealist greats, Tyberghein—a master of trompe l’oeil—takes us on a trip to the circus for her stateside solo debut. Seventeen new oil paintings (and some suggestively elephantine gallery benches) fill up our big Bowery tent this September.

There have been salutes to the circus in Charline’s work since the beginning, a theme brewing but yet to be fully recognized by their creator. Signature stripes, checkers and harlequin patterns grab your gaze, but the details and delights revealing themselves only upon closer looking; she makes us work for it. The paintings begin with the patterning: the artist does not use tape and instead her technical execution is possible only with layering and precise planning, deconstructing images in her head and figuring out exactly how it will work before puzzle-piecing it back together.

In this new body of work Charline brings in more human components into the painting. “Painting quotidian objects had begun to feel distant,” noted the artist. “Anthropomorphizing the work with gloves and ruffs instead softens the works to feels less sterile.” In Lost AND Found?!?! we see elegant evening gloves rendered as marble hands, impractically holding scissors. In Sloppy Sad Sleepy ruffled knickers await discovery under the yellow and black stripe pattern and in Sighlence we find heeled boots made of rope. In about half the paintings, actually, a jesterly ruff at the top of the composition alludes to a figure, presumably Clownette’s head, just cropped out of view.

Traditionally there is no female or male clown, there is just "clown"; with this show title Charline explicitly declines this gender neutrality with the feminine diminutive form: Clownette. “It’s funny at first, then kind of sad how feminization and smaller-ization go hand in hand,” remarks Charline. “As I get older I’m finding myself leaning more into gender in my work.” The style of clowning depicted in this exhibition comes from the Pierrot school of sad clown, pining for his lady love. Charline works from an archive of imagery compiled over many years (as an analog person she has folders of printed pictures and references), then carefully composes a balance between the sweet and girly and something to "enhance the depth of emotion with a little sting to it.”

While in the studio, Charline takes on up to ten paintings at once in a dizzying pattern-fest to allow for oil paint drying times. Her titles come last, pulled from a notebook with years of scribbled words, saving the titles for the perfect work. “Titling artworks shows how seriously you take it, so it’s important there is an element of humor to counterbalance the sadness and melancholy.” What A Great Feeling To Be The Horse You Bet On is a title that sat for five years waiting for the perfect painting.

Charline’s circus isn’t nostalgic for a vintage Big Top tent; she is seeing today, in the world around us, a kind of a circus with heads of states around the world acting like clowns. While offering us the joy and play our eyeballs crave, her paintings contain a polite reminder that the joke's on us, the general public. Clowns and jesters are capable of highlighting the ridiculousness of situations, often tasked with speaking truth to power, or at least having a free pass to mock it. Charline asks in this show whether the role of the artist similar.

Charline Tyberghein (1993, Antwerp, BE) lives and works in Antwerp. She has exhibited in numerous group shows at The Hole in New York and Los Angeles over the last 5 years (Second Smile, Nature Morte, Horripilation, Tone Poem) and we couldn't be more excited to host her stateside solo debut. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2018 and has exhibited extensively internationally since. Recent solo exhibitions include Unapologetically Sorry and Worrier Princess, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, BE, Domestic Blitz, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, CN and Sugar and Spite, L21 Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, ES. Her works have been presented in institutions such as the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany, M HKA Antwerp and Beursschouwburg in Brussels. Her work is in the collections of the M HKA Antwerp, Vlaamse Gemeenschap and the Belfius collection. She is currently working on a second collaboration with Hermes along with and a 2026 exhibition with Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, her Belgian gallery, who we are grateful for their thoughtful collaboration for this exhibition.