Anne-Claire Schmitz

Anne-Claire Schmitz is a curator based in Brussels, recently appointed senior curator at M UHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. In 2019, she curated ‘Mondo Cane’ the exhibition by Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys for the Belgian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale.

From 2012 until the summer of 2019, she has been committed to the conception and development of La Loge, a privately initiated non-profit organization at the heart of Brussels. As the founding director and curator of this small-scale institution for art, architecture and theory, she had the privilege to imagine its posture, public role and artistic programme. Throughout her directorship, one of her core concerns has been to facilitate intimate, human and lively encounters as well as to provide a challenging and open production context for guest contributors encouraging them to look for the characteristic and the peculiar within their practice. Her programme particularly paid attention to questions of space, habitat, use and material culture, while being a site for exploring the potential of interdisciplinary encounters. At La Loge, she has developed various project formats: discursive live programmes such as ‘Leonard Koren & guests’ and ‘Open Perspectives on Oskar Hansen’; group exhibitions such as ‘Voici des Fleurs’ and ‘Pastoral Myths’ as well as a range of solo exhibitions with Andreas Angelidakis, Sophie Nys, Roe Ethridge & Zin Taylor, Kate Newby, Sven Augustijnen, Peter Hutton, Emily Wardill, Michael Beutler, Gareth Moore, Jef Geys and Arvo Leo among other artists. 

Prior to this, she was a curator at Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where she curated major public commissions, group exhibitions and ‘Melanchotopia’ a citywide exhibition inviting forty international artists to develop site-specific propositions across Rotterdam. 

Alongside her main commitments, she has regularly been invited to curate exhibitions for other institutions. Among them, ‘Les Bons Sentiments’, the 19th Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Prize (Fondation Ricard, Paris, 2017), ‘Individual Stories – Collecting as Portrait and Methodology’ (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2015 - co-curated with Luca Lo Pinto) and ‘Un-Scene II’ (WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, 2012 - co-curated with Elena Filipovic).