Tatjana Pieters is honoured to invite you to Grace grit grin, the third solo exhibition by Belgian artist Ilke Cop, alongside [Guest] curated by Ilke Cop, a curated response by celebrated South African artist Kendell Geers. An intergenerational dialogue unfolds between two uncompromising voices in contemporary art, resulting in a charged exchange around the codes of art history, (female) embodiment, and the subversive power of play.

In Grace grit grin, Ilke Cop examines the internalisation of visual codes of femininity embedded in everyday objects. Damaged porcelain figurines of women, frozen in poses of mothers, caretakers, or lovers, are not restored but remade. Working from her own likeness, Cop sculpts grotesquely grinning heads that parody the polite smile historically demanded of women.

Through photography and the re-enactment of these poses, the artist translates them into painting. On canvas, the bodies appear almost too large for the frame—expansive and forceful, juxtaposed with the stone fragments of the sculptures. An intimate reflection on a turbulent period of fracture and stillness in the artist’s own life, Grace Grit Grin is an attempt to sublimate visceral experience into a transformative form.

Parallel to this exhibition, Kendell Geers presents a curated selection of new and historical works conceived as reply and counterpoint. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s dictum “a Guest + a Host = a Ghost,” Geers inhabits Cop’s exhibition as guest, echo, and spectral double. Geers breaks through the clean language of Minimalism in a play of linguistic and visual codes. In his paintings and photographs of severed flowers, the element of rupture reveals the fragility of beauty and the violence beneath it. His Idols sculptures — objects wrapped in red-and-white emergency tape — redefine entrenched colonial frameworks.

Together, the two exhibitions propose Grace (aesthetics), Grit (resistance) and Grin (humour) as vital and unstable forces within an artists practice. Cop and Geers explore how art continually transforms consciousness by challenging our inherited structures of understanding.