Located steps from the Grand Sablon, at the heart of Brussels’ historic art district, a neo-Flemish townhouse built in 1888 houses Jonathan F. Kugel’s Cabinet de Curiosités Contemporain. Distinguished by its turreted façade and sculpted balcony, the building once served as a lawyer’s office before being transformed into a space dedicated to contemporary artistic research and exhibition.

Conceived as a contemporary interpretation of the cabinet of curiosities, the gallery proposes a program of solo and thematic exhibitions in which historical and contemporary works are presented in deliberate dialogue. Objects spanning several centuries are brought into conversation with works by living artists, creating constellations that question chronology, material hierarchies, and established exhibition conventions.

The gallery’s program places particular emphasis on practices rooted in craftsmanship, material knowledge, and technical mastery. Contemporary ceramics, painting, drawing, and other craft-based approaches are central to the Cabinet’s curatorial vision. The artists presented share an engagement with process and making, often exploring tensions between control and unpredictability, refinement and strangeness, tradition and experimentation.

As articulated by Jonathan F. Kugel:

“The qualities I seek in a contemporary piece are no different from those I value in an antique: virtuosity, craftsmanship, historical significance, and a distinct artistic vision. Ultimately, an object should evoke emotions — beauty, intrigue, or a touch of the grotesque — while simultaneously stimulating the intellect through its scientific or technical ingenuity.”

A defining focus of the gallery is contemporary ceramics, understood as a medium of exceptional expressive and conceptual potential. Through its physicality and transformation by fire, clay becomes a site where technical expertise intersects with chance, allowing for outcomes that resist full anticipation.

“I specialize in contemporary ceramics, an incredibly rich medium where the artist expresses themselves freely with their unique mark, mastering a technique while leaving room for alchemy during the firing process, where all bets can sometimes be off.”

Through its exhibition program, Jonathan F. Kugel’s Cabinet de Curiosités Contemporain positions itself as a space for sustained looking, critical dialogue, and cross-temporal exchange, contributing to ongoing discussions around materiality, authorship, and the place of craft within contemporary art.