May I have this dance? – Bob Geerts

There is a recurring tension in Bob Geerts’ paintings that refuses to be resolved. Two figures chained together, bodies pressed against one another, limbs intertwined, and yet what exactly is happening between them remains consciously, visibly open. Is it love? A struggle? A slow and laborious dance? Geerts offers no answer. That unresolved space between the figures is precisely where he wants you to be.

This work continues the artistic transition Geerts began at COVA in 2023, where he traded the bold, graphic visual language of his tattoo career for a more enduring and personal form of expression in painting. A journey that later evolved into quieter and more poetic work in Aalborg, and culminated in the Berlin exhibition When It All Hangs In The Air in 2025, where distorted figures and burdened bodies reflected the overwhelming pressure of fatherhood and juggling through daily life, trying to hold everything together while silently falling apart. What Geerts brings back to COVA is the result of a profound personal transformation, shaped by the arrival of his daughter Rosa and the emotional shift that followed. The new paintings explore how a life-changing event can quietly alter every relationship around you, including the relationship with yourself. Love changes form, intimacy takes on new weight, and familiar roles begin to fade. The people closest to you can suddenly feel simultaneously more connected and more distant.

It is not a story belonging exclusively to parenthood, but to every experience that fundamentally changes how you move through the world—moments after which nothing fully returns to what it was. The figures in these works are not illustrations of those experiences, but emotional translations of them. Bodies stretch out, lean towards one another, resist, carry, dissolve. There is tenderness in the work, but also tension and a continuous negotiation between closeness and individuality, stability and overwhelm.

Geerts presses the images against the edges of the canvas, thus preventing clear conclusions or fixed meanings. What remains is a space where vulnerability, transformation, and connection exist simultaneously, in a state that feels both intimate and universal.

Opening: 19:00, Fri 19 June