Carole Ebtinger
Sentir - de quelle couleur cela peut il être ?
Brussels
January 16 – February 21, 2026
Nino Mier Gallery is please to present Carole Ebtinger’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Sentir - de quelle couleur cela peut il être ?. Carole Ebtinger works exclusively on paper. At first glance this is not immediately apparent, as her approach is strongly rooted in the language of abstract painting. In her practice she works like a painter, building each work layer by layer without knowing in advance when it will be finished. She uses pure ink, pastel and rubs pigment directly into the paper. Pastel and charcoal are added to refine the vague, nature-inspired forms. The movements and intensity of these shapes reflect the different periods she navigates in life, where emotional awareness becomes an important influence among various personal and contextual forces.
Some titles refer to conversations with loved ones and other social relationships, while others are drawn from literature that speaks to her during the creation process. The emotional freedom she has experienced in recent years is clearly visible in the increasingly expressive gestures that emerge in her recent work. This solo exhibition reveals this newly found, ecstatic sense of freedom and happiness through captivating colours, movement and layered materiality.
Following her residency with The Fores Project in London, UK, the organisation’s Associate Director, Olivia Rumsey, wrote the following text about Carole Ebtinger’s work:
Carole Ebtinger’s work rejects ideas of divine inspiration. In the studio, it’s Ebtinger and the materials caught in an exchange of feeling-making-making-feeling. The artist responds to the press of pastel in hand and in turn the press of pastel against paper. The work is built in layers of pigment, ink and pastel as Ebtinger responds to what appears in front of them. Marks range from brazen to tentative, small licks of ink contrast fervourous pastel. Through the process, the artist starts to covet certain marks, guarding them from new ones, these become gently cradled by the rushing stream of mark-marking. When the works are finished, it’s these marks that appear to glow from within the piece.
The works thrum with energy like they could shift and change at any moment. Like they are shifting and changing, in a state of flux, as a viewer’s eyes rove, as we stand back or move closer, so the marks sit differently against one another. Motion flows through the paintings, in an underlying current, like those we find in nature; in the sea, in the wind before a storm, and those we find in the body; the swirling of intense emotion in the gut, the syrupy shift of heartbreak that flows in waves from the chest. There’s a poetic nature to the work, a reflection of the artist’s internal world put to paper, a kind of emotional diary.
Some works feel like departures, farewells, reminiscence – heartache. Others, a rediscovery, a careful mapping of new feelings and hopeful beginnings. A piece could take a matter of hours, or be mulled over across long periods before Ebtinger feels they are complete, only finished once the artist has settled with them. Working across several works at once, pieces in the same series communicate with each other, different stories written in the same pen.
Carole Ebtinger (b.1995, Vietnam, lives and works in Brussels, BE) holds a MA Drawing from the ENSAV La Cambre, Brussels, BE. She has had solo exhibitions with Barbé, Ghent, BE and Sarah Brook Gallery, Los Angeles and New York, US and at BOZAR. Recent group exhibitions were held at Barbé, Ghent, BE; South Parade Gallery, London, UK and IRL Gallery, New York, US. In 2021, she was awarded the Eeckman Art Prize and exhibited her work at the prestigious BOZAR Museum in Brussels, BE.