Raphaela Vogel – De mens is geen vogel

From 4 October to 21 February 2027 at Z33

30/09/2026

Raphaela Vogel, Found Subject, 2023. Installation view at Kunstenhuis Z33, Hasselt. Courtesy the artist and BQ, Berlin. Photo: Lola Pertsowsky. — Raphaela Vogel, *Found Subject*, 2023. Installation view at Kunstenhuis Z33, Hasselt. Courtesy the artist and BQ, Berlin. Photo: Lola Pertsowsky.

German artist Raphaela Vogel (°1988, Neurenberg) presents her first large-scale solo exhibition in Belgium, at Kunstenhuis Z33. With De mens is geen vogel, Vogel brings together an immersive world of image, sound and movement - an exhibition you feel with your whole body.

The man who is not allowed to fly

The exhibition's title is at once a nod to the artist's own surname. At the same time, it refers to a poem written by German writer Bertolt Brecht around a hundred years ago, about a tailor from Ulm who, in the year 1592, was convinced he could fly. He jumps from the church roof, hoping to fly away, and plunges to his death. Afterwards, the bishop speaks the famous words: "Man is not a bird. Man will never fly." For Raphaela Vogel, this is an image for how power determines what we consider possible or permitted. Her work continually explores that boundary.

Who is Raphaela Vogel?

Vogel is a distinctly multidisciplinary artist. She paints, sculpts, creates installations and videos, performs, composes and sings her own soundtracks. She belongs to a generation of artists who grew up with digital technology as an artistic tool: she films herself with drones, 360° cameras and 3D scanners, and is invariably the lead character in her own videos. She never works with a film crew — filming, directing and editing are all done by her alone. This do-it-yourself mentality is partly rooted in her youth in the punk scene, where she was a singer in a band herself.

That anarchic, raw energy still runs through her work, in monumental sculptures often made from found objects and combined with sound, light and movement.

In recent years, Vogel has exhibited at, among others, Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), Petzel Gallery (New York), Museum De Pont (Tilburg), Kunsthaus Bregenz, and Haus der Kunst (Munich), and took part in the 2022 Venice Biennale (The Milk of Dreams , curated by Cecilia Alemani).

Faster than your mind

The same principle recurs throughout her entire oeuvre: contrast. Vogel doesn't work with narrative structures, with a beginning and an end.

Instead, she lets opposites collide, such as monumentality and vulnerability, the technical and the physical, humor and fear, and banality and myth. It's precisely in that tension between extremes that what she herself calls "small shocks" arise: brief moments in which your body reacts faster than your mind, as it once did at the fair or in the circus. Anyone walking through the halls of Z33 is immersed in an environment full of sound, light and movement, such as sirens, whispers, the drone of airplanes, and tears that glisten. What emerges is a world that isn't detached from reality, but one that magnifies, distorts and puts it under tension.

A new work, created especially for Z33

For this exhibition, Vogel creates a brand new, monumental installation: an anatomical model of an eye almost two meters wide, from which dozens of "tears" hang, found Art Deco lamps she equipped with light and speakers. Visitors walk straight through the tears to enter the exhibition and, from the middle, can look right into the iris. It is the literal and figurative starting point of the exhibition: a gateway into the world of Raphaela Vogel.

Alongside this new work, Z33 presents around ten large installations in which video, sculpture, painting and sound come together, each with its own story, ranging from a hidden history of war to dancing dinosaurs.

Curator: Kevin Gallagher