Birgitta Seghers has been painting, drawing and exploring forms since childhood. As a child, her room was filled with drawings and sketches. Her desire to paint has remained with her ever since. Since 1997, she has studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Dendermonde, the Academy of Fine Arts in Mechelen, LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Anderlecht. Her work has developed largely outside the established art world, without aligning herself with particular movements or trends. She lives and works in the small village of Malderen, in the Belgian countryside. Her studio and the quiet landscape surrounding it, with its fields, meadows and woodland, provide the peace and concentration she
needs to work.

Working primarily in oil on canvas, Seghers paints exclusively on large canvases. Her paintings emerge layer by layer, through an interplay of color, texture and time. Without a sketch or predetermined idea, she begins intuitively, without knowing where the work will lead. Layers are painted over, removed, added and started again. As the painting develops, she responds to what has emerged on the canvas. What she sees determines the next step. In this way, the work gradually takes shape over time until it finds its form and, eventually, its title.

Seghers allows her work to remain open. Her paintings do not begin with a fixed meaning, but take shape anew through each encounter with the viewer. The forms that appear in her paintings seem to tell stories, but those stories are never fixed. A painting can mean something without needing to be precisely defined. It can evoke beauty or joy, but it can also call forth something else. What someone discovers in it belongs to that person.