Sometimes I Run. Ethel Coppieters

Sometimes I Run is an honest and vibrant proposal by Ethel Coppieters. The Belgian artist’s work invites us to contemplate contemporary women from a perspective that alternates between movement and stillness, between the intimate and the collective, between the dreamlike and the deeply real.

Coppieters’ paintings are scenes frozen in an eternal moment. There is a warmth that floods everything, in the light, in the figures, in the gestures, as if each canvas wanted to prolong that moment when the world stops and the importance falls on the women who run, hold hands, rest, and think. These are bodies in action and at rest that characterize the artist’s pictorial language.

Ethel Coppieters condenses sensations. Her backgrounds, almost abstract, place the viewer in places that do not respond to geographical logic, but rather emotional logic. In the midst of these unreal settings, modern objects and key everyday actions appear that anchor the scene to concrete experiences, giving each painting an implicit narrative. In some of the paintings in this new exhibition of her work, the artist begins to explore nature and the sensitive connection between the natural world and human beings.

In Sometimes I Run, there is a clear celebration of sisterhood among women, of their shared power, of the intimacy that is built without the need for words. These female figures do not seek perfection, but rather to show themselves with the dignity of everyday life, with the beauty of those who live without asking permission. Ethel Coppieters thus constructs a contemporary Venus who is multifaceted, changeable, and empowered. Coppieters’ muses are powerful, they live freely, they have no prejudices, and inhabit their naked skin in fullness.

The exhibition is also a space for recognition. Not only are the women who surround and inspire Ethel Coppieters in her usual environment depicted, but the contemporary woman on the street is also represented. It is an invitation to stop and feel.