The Pursuit of the Abyss marks Joren Van Acker’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, drawing viewers toward the outer limits of the known ocean.
Rooted in the exploration of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench—the deepest point on Earth, descending beyond 10,900 meters—the exhibition reflects on humanity’s rare and fragile encounters with this extreme realm. Historic missions such as the 1960 Trieste dive by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, and James Cameron’s 2012 solo descent, quietly echo throughout the works on view.
The exhibition unfolds like a slow descent. Van Acker presents drawings of submarines and deep-sea divers, intimate portraits of Piccard and Don Walsh, expansive seascapes, potrafts and haunting images of cable factories—from the first coils of steel and fiber on land to their final disappearance into the ocean’s depths. Together, these works trace the long passage from human intention to submerged action, where engineering, risk, and imagination are bound to the dark.
Driven by a lifelong fascination with marine life, Van Acker draws endlessly from images that carry both wonder and narrative weight. In The Pursuit of the Abyss, he deepens his practice of dark, layered charcoal drawings, transforming pressure, silence, and distance into dense, immersive surfaces where technology, humanity, and the unknown drift into one another.
