Marilou Dejans is a Brussels-based Belgian artist working primarily in painting. Since graduating from the Royal Academy of Antwerp in 2019, she has developed a distinctive practice that blends visual with live arts to explore human connection, discomfort and absurdity. Through an intuitive process of reworking and overpainting, she foregrounds the tactile presence of canvas and paint. Dejans approaches painting as a spatial and performative medium, extending it beyond the canvas. Drawing on a background in theatre, she engages in multidisciplinary collaborations, including Sound of C with accordion player Suzan Peeters (C-mine, Genk, 2025) and scenographic work for Avalon Emerson All Night Long (The Cause, London, 2023).

For Horst 2026, she teams up with Nel Maertens. Nel Maertens is a visual artist based in Antwerp with a background in fashion. After completing her master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, she began working in the fashion industry, from which she gradually developed a multidisciplinary practice situated at the intersection of visual art, costume design, and performance.

Maertens creates drawings, paintings, performances, and installations characterised by colour, energy, and a playful approach to mark-making, with a particular focus on femininity and nature. Her artistic career gained momentum in 2021 with her first solo exhibition at CC Strombeek. Since then, she has collaborated with institutions and organisations such as KMSKA, Rubenshuis, C-Mine, and Rufus Gallery. She co-created a ‘dream garden’ with 150 children on the rooftop of MoMu Antwerp, designed costumes for dance and music theatre productions such as those by Femke Gyselinck and Zonzo Compagnie, and created jewellery and design objects for labels such as Woche.