Brussels is still a city contending with stereotypes (big on bureaucracy and moules frites; low on high-octane excitement) but there are, of course, other stories to be told about it, some of them even rooted in reality. Before my first visit, my knowledge of the city didn’t reach far beyond some of the popular notions, but I had heard a good deal about its dense network of galleries and museums and, for that reason, Brussels Art Week seemed like the perfect moment to see the city for myself.

The first fully fledged edition of Brussels Art Week, also called ‘RendezVous’ by its founders, took place over four days in early September, involving galleries, public and private institutions and artist-run spaces and a series of events including studio tours and exhibition openings. RendezVous was set up last year by curators Evelyn Simons and Laure Decock, who saw a gap in the city’s cultural calendar after Brussels Gallery Weekend folded last May after 16 years. The duo came up with an event in less than four months. More than 50 galleries, institutions and artist spaces took part in the initiative – a clear indication of the appetite for a collegiate event.

The event returned this year, this time with more than 64 participants across the city. A new addition was the Salon de RendezVous, a hub for talks, performances and evening events. Here, the British artist Zoe Williams made an installation called The Tip Inn, where candlelit tables and a fully functioning bar sat beneath a wall-sized print of Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Prodigal Son (1536) and garlands of sausage and bread rolls – a homage to Belgian bar snacks. On my first night, the space was packed, with passers-by lured in by the red glow emitted by the Tip Inn’s tinted windows. Simons and Decock’s characterisation of Brussels as a place where ‘perfumed fur coats rustle against grimy leather rave jackets’ rang true here: one reveller, nursing a hangover from the venue’s previous evening event, said DJ sets had come one after the other until the early morning.

Located in the popular Sablon neighbourhood, the Tip Inn was within walking distance of several blue-chip galleries with outposts in Brussels as well as in what Simons and Decock call ‘big sister’ cities such as Paris and London. Many galleries here have embraced the architecture of existing buildings; in 2017, Mendes Wood DM set up shop in a historic townhouse. The interior seems largely unchanged: a grand wooden staircase is pleasingly mismatched with the gallery’s current exhibition, a cacophonous display of video works, textile sculptures and more by the French-Caribbean artist Julian Creuzet. Contrasts like this crop up across the city: cobblestoned streets lead to heavy, brutalist buildings; white-cube galleries back on to sprawling gardens. Indeed, it’s something that RendezVous capitalises on, embracing venues that demonstrate the variousness of the city and its cultural offerings.

Around the corner at Gladstone, a sparse exhibition of new paintings by Nicholas Bierk offered a more contemplative experience. The Canadian artist’s hazy, hyperrealist interiors, still lifes and portraits have an alluring if not slightly unsettling quality; Untitled (2025), showing a faceless woman turned towards a dark doorway, evokes the quiet unease of a Hammershøi interior. In the stripped-back space of Nino Mier Gallery were large paintings by Gregory Hodge, whose application of paint gives the expansive Australian horizons in works such as May Evening (2025) a quality resembling the warp and weft of tapestries.

While commercial galleries are an essential component of RendezVous, so too are public and private museums. Hopes are high, say Simons and Decock, that they will play a bigger part in future editions. At WIELS, a contemporary art museum in a former brewery, ‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order’ presented works by more than 30 artists such as Cecilia Vicuña and Otobong Nkanga that examine humanity’s destructive relationship with nature. RendezVous’s programming also turned towards smaller, more experimental galleries such as Grège Gallery, a sun-filled downtown gallery founded by Marie de Brouwer that is both an exhibition space and a furniture showroom. Here, de Brouwer presented paintings by the French artist Juliette Lemontey such as Baigneuse (2019), a closely cropped scene of a girl bathing in water, her pale features stark against raven hair and washes of steely blue. These were complemented by delicate works in wood by the Ivorian artist Sepa.

Part of Simons and Decock’s celebration of Brussels is prompted by the idea that the city is somewhere budding artists can still ‘afford to live and create’. One of the highlights of RendezVous was the chance to explore where exactly these artists are living and creating, away from the gloss of the galleries. Hectolitre, tucked in a quiet midtown backstreet, is like some kind of haunted playground; in reality, it’s a converted ex-swingers’ club, which now houses seven artists-in-residence on a rotating basis. On the eve of their open house, one resident rang in her birthday by singing a line from Dido’s ‘Thank You’ on a 10-hour loop, the microphone following her everywhere – even into the bathroom. It felt like a case study for what was occurring across the city, each work utterly different from the next: in one room, a video-work by Maria Stuut, Becoming a Dune (Verduinen) (2025), showed the artist being slowly enveloped by sand; in a ’60s-style former bathroom bathed in purple light, Mélanie Ganino constructed a mirrored altar, playfully referred to as a ‘spa for our minds’.

Hectolitre was my final stop before I barrelled back to the city centre, carry-on suitcase clacking against cobblestones. The baroque guild houses of the Grand-Place had been somewhat obscured – for better or for worse, depending on who you ask – by the festivities of Brussels Beer Weekend, but I didn’t feel I was missing out. Judging by a brief visit, much of the city’s real charm lies in venues and galleries just off the beaten track and, although events like RendezVous help bring them into focus, they’re ripe for discovery all year round.

Brussels Art Week took place around the city from 4–7 September 2025.