Oscar's Chickens, 2022

Gerda Van Damme  

Gerda Van Damme is a Belgian visual artist working across painting, installation, video, and digital media, whose practice explores the layered territories of memory, perception, and the unseen. Her work investigates how images carry traces of lived experience—how they fracture, persist, and reassemble across time. Through subtle distortions, archival references, and a precise yet poetic visual language, Van Damme creates works that oscillate between observation and reconstruction, inviting viewers into a space where the familiar becomes quietly estranged.

Van Damme received her Painting Certificate with Great Distinction from the Académie Alphonse Darville in Charleroi (Belgium). She further refined her technical and conceptual approach through advanced workshops with a.o. Antonio López García, Andrés García Ibáñez, and Toña Gómez, deepening her engagement with observational realism, spatial ambiguity, and the psychological resonance of imagery.

Her work has been exhibited internationally in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States, including presentations at the Arsenale in Venice (Arte Laguna Prize, twice), HB55 Kunstfabrik in Berlin, the Undo Arts Center in Brooklyn, MECA Mediterráneo Centro Artístico in Almería,the Palacio de Viana in Cordoba, WG Gallery in Dordrecht, and multiple Belgian cultural institutions. She has been selected as a finalist for major juried competitions such as the Arte Laguna Prize, the Biennale de l'Art Pierre Paulus, the Prix des Arts Plastiques et Visuels du Waux‑hall, the MiniARTures International Contest, and the Prix de la Peinture de Woluwe Saint‑Pierre. In 2025, she received the Audience Prize and Jury Mention at the Prix des Arts Plastiques et Visuels du Waux‑hall.

Her practice has been supported by grants from the Fédération Wallonie‑Bruxelles, the Province of Hainaut, the City of Charleroi, and the Eden Cultural Center, notably for her work with the artists' collective and for the curation of contemporary art projects such as and .

Van Damme works within shifting landscapes—geographical, emotional, and mnemonic. This duality informs her sensitivity to the quiet intensities of the everyday: the overlooked, the peripheral, the nearly‑forgotten. 

Her works are held in private collections in Belgium, Spain, Germany, France, Dubai and the United States.