Julien Meert

Julien Meert was born in 1983 in Brussels (Belgium) where he still lives and works. He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (until 2004) before enrolling in the painting studio at La Cambre (2004-2009).

Meert works in painting, drawing, collage, video, and music (under the pseudonym Roger 3000). His multidisciplinary practice blends autobiographical elements with cultural references from the 1980s-1990s, from analogue to graffiti, cinema, and arcade games. Despite a cheerful palette, his work, which is part romance, part nostalgia, part melancholy, reflects inner conflict, loneliness, and existential malaise. These violent themes are playfully expressed through recurring motifs in his pictorial language. Sketched in an almost childlike manner, they float on the solid-coloured backgrounds that make up the artist's mental landscapes. Seemingly simple, his deceptively naive work is at once strange, personal, polysemic, and complex.

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Sorry We're Closed in Brussels (2023, 2018), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris (2022), Krieg Gallery in Hasselt (2020), Clearing in Brussels (2016), Balice Hertling in New York (2015) and Island, Brussels (2013). He has also participated in numerous group shows since 2009, including at Kunsthal Ghent (2021), Musée d'Ixelles (2016), WIELS (2015) and Komplot (2011) in Brussels. His work can be found in several private collections in Belgium and abroad.