Ria Verhaeghe

Ria Verhaeghe (b. 1950) lives and works in Bruges, Belgium. 

For the past three decades, Verhaeghe has collected images from international newspapers, and cataloged them in an image bank which now contains over 60,000 entries. This ongoing database encompasses an enormous range of subjects, and is articulated around three idiosyncratic themes: ”Fusion”, which groups images by symbolic qualities (strangeness, beauty); “Mindwave”, which gathers images by formal visual qualities (texture, geometry); “Human Interest”, which encompasses moments charged which human emotion (acts of bravery, expressions of grief, people who have died). 

These categories often overlap, as they capture fragments of a complex reality in constant motion. Verhaeghe is interested in how we build our understanding of the world from these glimpses, circulated through mass media; for the majority of her practice, this meant print journalism, where lived experiences of the globe are flattened onto newsprint and scattered. Each newspaper contains empirical, historical information on the daily events of its time; it also forms part of a bigger picture, of shifting cultural languages and evolving technologies. By offering subjective pathways through her enormous archive, Verhaeghe invites the viewer to experience the images not only as information to be processed, but as windows into a world to be sensed, felt, as it once was by the creator(s) and/or subject(s) of the image. 

This archive is a life’s work in itself, but it is also the “matrix” for other pieces: Verhaeghe transforms some of the found images through various mediums including painting, embroidery, sculpture, and video, reflecting her sensitive approach to stories which, as they enter the realm of mass media, are often emptied of their emotion. In this way, her practice expresses a sense of empathy for the material world, resisting its disappearance as it becomes ever more disembodied and fractured. 

Though Verhaeghe obtained a visual arts degree at the Royal Academy of Kortrijk in 1978, she began her career as a nurse, working in a hospital for some years before devoting herself fulltime to raising her children. During this period, she began developing the threads of care, patience, observation that would follow her throughout her practice. Verhaeghe’s work has been the subject of solo and duo exhibitions including at Be-Part (Waregem, BE); Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent, BE); Galerie C. De Vos (Aalst, BE); Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, ES);  FOMU – Photo Museum Antwerp (BE); and Huis van Herman Teirlinck (Beersel, BE). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, BE); Museum Dr. Guislain (Ghent, BE); Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, BE); Cultuurcentrum Brugge (BE); the 5th Biennale of Moscow (RU); the 18th Biennale of Sydney (AU); the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE); and many more. Her first monograph, Provisoria, was published by Art Paper Editions in 2025; it includes texts by Barbara De Coninck and by Philippe Van Cauteren, the director of S.M.A.K - Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent, BE).