• About SEPT

     
    Founded by Florian Araïb in Brussels in 2018, SEPT is a contemporary art gallery built around a belief in movement: between cultures, materials, generations and ways of seeing. Its international programme brings together artists whose practices explore abstraction through matter, gesture and process, with a particular attention to works that reveal their complexity over time.
     
    SEPT’s programme is centred on abstraction, material intelligence and the physical processes through which an artwork takes form. Bringing together emerging and established voices from Europe, Asia and beyond, the gallery represents artists working across painting, sculpture, paper and textile-based practices. Despite their different cultural and material languages, their work shares an engagement with gesture, repetition, accumulation, transformation and time. This dialogue between distinct practices gives the programme its coherence while allowing each artist to retain a singular position.

    Originally established as Galerie Sept, the gallery became SEPT as its identity expanded beyond the parameters of a conventional exhibition space. The transition was more than a change of name. It marked the evolution of a young Brussels gallery into a wider artistic platform operating through exhibitions, international art fairs, publications, private projects and sustained collaborations with artists and collectors. “SEPT” is deliberately direct and open-ended: a single name for a structure that continues to evolve.

    Today, SEPT operates from Brussels and Knokke. Its Knokke flagship allows for ambitious, architecturally driven exhibitions, while SEPT Project Space, located beneath the gallery, offers a more experimental environment for concentrated presentations and new curatorial formats. Together, the spaces reflect two complementary aspects of the gallery: precision and freedom, permanence and experimentation.

    SEPT approaches gallery-making with institutional commitment and entrepreneurial agility. Its development has never followed a predetermined model. Each exhibition, space and collaboration is treated as an opportunity to create meaningful context around an artist’s work and to accompany their practice over the long term. More than representing artists, SEPT seeks to construct the conditions through which their work can enter important collections, reach new audiences and assume a lasting position within contemporary art.
  • A Structure for Artists “I founded SEPT in Brussels in 2018 with the conviction that a gallery should never be...

    A Structure for Artists

    “I founded SEPT in Brussels in 2018 with the conviction that a gallery should never be defined only by its walls. It should be capable of creating momentum around an artist, placing their work within a wider cultural dialogue and building the conditions for a practice to endure. From the beginning, my ambition was not simply to organise exhibitions, but to construct a structure through which artists could develop, take risks and reach beyond the contexts in which they were first discovered.”

    “Our programme is shaped by artists who transform matter into language. Across different cultures, generations and disciplines, their practices are connected by a shared intensity: an engagement with gesture, repetition, time and the physical intelligence of materials. I am interested in work that resists immediate consumption, work that continues to unfold and gradually changes the way we look.”

    “The evolution from Galerie Sept to SEPT expresses this vision. It gives us the freedom to operate across spaces, scales and formats while remaining precise in our direction. I want SEPT to combine the commitment and continuity of an institution with the agility of something still being invented. The objective is not expansion for its own sake, but the creation of something lasting: a gallery with a distinct position, an international voice and the courage to continue evolving.”

     

    Florian Araïb

    Founder