Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present Treasury, a new exhibition of paintings by Belgian artist Jan De Vliegher. For his premier exhibition at the gallery, De Vliegher has created a series of monumental paintings referencing his photographs of porcelain plates housed behind glass showcases in various museum collections. While the individual plate themes vary, he essentially paints the same subject over and over in a ritualistic manner, developing them into a series; striving to differentiate the painting from the original photograph. In the same way Baselitz’s act of turning paintings upside down ignores literary meaning, the “plate-paintings” as De Vliegher calls them, overlook the differences of genre and style because of the sameness of their circular compositions. Brushstrokes are applied fluidly and broadly so when the viewer looks closely, the subject disappears into a circular abstract work, narrowing the focus onto the painterly aspect. Referencing the romantic, the bourgeois, and the kitsch, De Vliegher takes the visual world and transforms it into the pictorial.