From January 7 to 21, 2026, National 55 Antwerp will present Antwerp Blue, a new solo exhibition by the Dutch abstract artist Dolf Verlinden. The show brings together some thirty new works — paintings and a single sculpture — created specifically for the occasion and unified by a single, elusive subject: Antwerp Blue.

The exhibition grew out of a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, is Antwerp Blue? Though the color is historically associated with the city, it has no fixed definition or standardized hue. That ambiguity became the point of departure for Verlinden’s months-long investigation into pigment history, ceramic traditions, material processes, and painting techniques. The result is a body of work in which color is no longer merely a vehicle, but at once the subject, the method, and the meaning.

Verlinden is known for an analytical, research-driven approach to abstraction. His work has been shown at the Groninger Museum and in numerous museums and galleries in the Netherlands and abroad. With Antwerp Blue, however, his focus narrows explicitly to Antwerp — as historical site, material origin, and symbolic reference. The exhibition was developed in close collaboration with National 55, where the artist previously exhibited in 2022.

Central to the project is the tension between chance and control. Antwerp Blue, Verlinden discovered, was not the result of deliberate color design, but a by-product of technical processes used in 16th-century Antwerp ceramics. This insight forms the conceptual core of the exhibition: painting as research, mixing as a form of thinking, and the palette as the site where the work begins, before brush ever meets canvas. The resulting works are restrained and concentrated, yet richly layered and materially present.