A Saturday-morning visit to Axel Vervoordt's gallery at Kanaal, the restored distillery outside Antwerp where the architecture curates and the art must hold its own.

It’s a Saturday morning in May. A gravel path runs along the old brick wall, past a single tree and a sawn-off log set in the grass as a bollard. The entrance is a black rectangle cut straight into the brick, unmarked.

Inside, the brick is from 1857 and left as it was found. The tall arched windows are bricked up flat. Where the building needed a floor or a stair, black steel and grey concrete have been set straight into it, none of it dressed to match. This is an old malting distillery on the Albert Canal, a few miles outside Antwerp, restored between 1999 and 2017. The old fabric and the new work are left in open contrast.

A round windowless concrete building rising from a pond of reeds and ivy, the brick distillery wall beside it under a blue sky.
The round concrete building in its reed-filled pond. Anish Kapoor's At the Edge of the World hangs inside.

The architecture does much of the curating here. It directs where you look and where you walk, and it does so openly.

A word on whose gallery this is, because the shorthand misleads. The contemporary gallery here opened in 2011, run by Boris Vervoordt and named after his father Axel’s antiques and interiors business. Axel is the collector and dealer whose method the whole site runs on. Boris runs the gallery. When people say Axel Vervoordt’s gallery, that’s what they mean.

The building moves you

The main staircase is narrow, grey concrete on both sides, climbing towards a panel of old brick lit from a light set in the ceiling above. The light sits at the top, so that is where you go.

A narrow grey concrete staircase climbing towards a panel of old brick lit from a ceiling light.
The stair climbs to a panel of brick, lit from the ceiling so the eye is pulled up.

Stay an hour and you watch the other visitors as much as the work. They slow at the same turns, drift to the same lit walls, stop in the same doorways. The building moves everyone the same way.

In a long brick corridor, a row of Kimsooja’s flags, To Breathe – The Flags, hangs in a line of 15, receding into the light at the far end.

Fifteen patchwork fabric flags by Kimsooja hung in a line down a narrow brick corridor, receding towards light.
Kimsooja, To Breathe – The Flags, down the brick corridor.

What holds up

The work that holds its place here is whatever can stand up to a building this strong. Plenty can’t.

Sopheap Pich’s first solo show in Belgium is on while I’m there. He builds rather than carves, in bamboo and rattan and in hand-forged copper and recycled aluminium, working from the grid structures of Cambodian craft. The pieces are built to hold a room.

In the group hang nearby, Bosco Sodi’s gilded terracotta column stands beside a thick cracked wall piece the grey of lunar ground, and a red enamelled rock sits on the floor. William Turnbull’s sculptures are here too: totems, a blade, a sphere on a column, forms that read as both ancient and modern.

A gilded terracotta column by Bosco Sodi in a dark room, a thick cracked grey wall relief on the far wall.
Bosco Sodi's gilded terracotta column, the cracked grey wall piece beyond.
A tall blade-shaped bronze sculpture with green patina on a pale plinth, lit in a dark room.
William Turnbull's blade. Patinated bronze, ancient and modern at once.

Two of the strongest works are permanent. Anish Kapoor’s At the Edge of the World (1998) and James Turrell’s Red Shift (1995) belong to the Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation and stay in place while the temporary shows change around them. The Kapoor hangs inside the round building by the water: a suspended dome about eight metres across, grey outside, deep red within, the red almost going to black. The Turrell occupies a former chapel, a field of red light that gives no sense of how far away it is.

Anish Kapoor's suspended dome seen from below, grey on the outside and deep red within, inside the round building.
Anish Kapoor, At the Edge of the World, 1998. Grey without, deep red within.

The whole site runs on a taste for age and for what time does to a surface: patina, wear, the cracked, the bricked-up. It is also a working place, with offices, workshops and around a hundred flats, so it never reads as a museum. You are a guest in something still in use.

The figure

This is where Vervoordt’s method shows plainly. Among the contemporary pieces sits a small Asian devotional figure, old, head bowed. Buddhist by the look of it, a monk or a luohan, though there’s no label, so I can’t give you the maker or the date. It carries no special billing. An object carved long ago, set beside work made last year. That pairing, old against new, is Vervoordt’s whole approach, and it runs through the building as much as the art.

A small seated devotional figure, a bowed monk, carved in worn reddish wood, lit on a pale plinth in a dark room.
A devotional figure. No label, no maker's name. Set among the contemporary work.

Worth the trip. Easily. Give it longer than you think you need; the work rewards the time and so does the building. SILO, the restaurant on site, does lunch if you time it.

It opens Saturdays, 11 to 6, otherwise by appointment. Stokerijstraat 19, Wijnegem, a few miles outside Antwerp. What’s on, hours and appointments are at axelvervoordtgallery.com. Go on a quiet day if you can. It reads better without a crowd.