Apart from evening drawing lessons in his youth Baele is a fully self taught artist.

SOLO EXPOSITIONS

1992 Den Bouw in Kalken, Belgium
1993 Een innerlijke oorlog, own atelier in Wetteren, Belgium
1994 Academie Leon in Serskamp, Belgium
1996 Den Bouw in Kalken, Belgium
1997 Huize St. Jacobs in Gent, Belgium
1998 Croxhapox Gent, Belgium
1999 Galerie William Wauters in Oosteeklo, Belgium
2000 12 voor Francis Baele, Den Bouw Kalken, Belgium
2001 Miserere cyclus I, de tocht der 18 wonden, Galerie William Wauters in Oosteeklo, Belgium
2002 Miserere cyclus II, de tocht der 18 wonden Galerie William Wauters in Oosteeklo, Belgium
2002 R.S.P.R.D.L., Center for spacial art in Lookeren, Belgium
2003 Miserere cyclus III, Galerie William Wauters in Oosteeklo, Belgium
2003 Heilung eines Kriegsverletzten, Campo Santo chapel in Gent, Belgium
2004 Drawings, Galerie De Keulenaer in Gent, Belgium
2005 Galerie Marcus in Gent, Belgium
2005 Essay pour Laura Munch, Den Bouw in Kalken, Belgium
2007-2008 From November 2007 till May 2008 Baele has a solo in the famous Dr. Guislain Outsider Art Museum in Gent, Belgium

GROUP EXPOSITIONS

1991 Bacchus resivited, Baasrode, Belgium
1992 Bart Baele-Dick de Vuyst, own atelier in Wetteren, Belgium
1997 Hedendaagse Belgische Schilderkunst, Croxhapox in Gent, Belgium
1998 SCH, De Bouw in Kalken, Belgium
1998 Hommage a Maurice Wykaert, Asse, Belgium
1998 De Opening, Posthotel in Wetteren, Belgium
1998 Winter 1998, Galerie William Wauters in Oosteeklo, Belgium
1999 Les Six, Posthotel in Wetteren, Belgium
2000 Opening new town hall in Lokeren, Belgium
2000 Omtrent Jan Burssens, Galerie William Wauters in Oosteeklo, Belgium
2000 Blik, De Bouw in Kalken, Belgium
2000 Les plus grands succes de J.S., Wulvergem, Belgium
2000 Over Fork Gallery Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst Sint-Lucas in Gent, Belgium
2002 Ankers, Oostende, Belgium
2006 Les extremes se touchent with Leo Kogan at Th Gallery, The Hague, The Netherlands
2006 Preview 2006-2007, Th Gallery, The Hague, The Netherlands
2007 Welsprekende portretten with Ph. Akkerman and W. Jolly with Th Gallery, The Hague, The Netherlands
2007 Preview 2007-2008, Th Gallery, The Hague, The Netherlands

COLLECTIONS

- Outsider Art Museum Dr. Guislain in Gent, Belgium
- Private collections in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Great Britain

Bart Baele (1969, Kalken, Belgium) is often mentioned as a so-called Outsider Artist. Besides a drawing course at an evening school during his youth, he is a self-taught artist. He refuses to train himself at an academy, for making aesthetically justified art isn’t something he strives for. He is a person for whom making art is something he only does for his own sake and not with a public looking over his shoulder in mind.

Baele works with oil paint from a very modest palette, on canvas and panel. He paints in an intuitive way, which results in powerful and extremely raw paintings that refer to an eternal suffering. They are the representations of a painful mind, mould in the form of a space where once he seemed to have been or in the form of a portrait. Such a portrait could depict the artist, alone or with someone else, with or without text. By working this way, he literally tries to paint out the demons that are inside his head.

A painting of Bart Baele could be read as a kind of amulet. With his works he seeks to temper the universal ‘inner wars’ in himself and in others. He goes for that goal by showing in his paintings an uncompromising honesty. Doing so gives him an attainable degree of peace for himself and also the hope that he is contributing to diminishing the sorrow in the world, to the prevention of new ‘outer wars’.

At the one hand, Baele depicts himself as a patient, hoping to get healed by someone, but at the other hand also as the healing doctor himself. He’s both the one who’s suffering and the one who can take away this suffer, like Jesus Christ. Other catholic symbols like wineglass, fish, blood and crucifix, are also present in his paintings. Artists who supply themselves with such a loaded iconography, do often not succeed in preventing their work from going over the top. That’s not the conclusion in the case of Bart Baele. You can see and feel that his works aren’t fake or a trick: his works are real.