Movement is at the heart of Lore Stessel’s work. Dance is a language—a language without words. In her photographic work, she condenses the moments shared with dancers and their relationship with the environment. What cannot be immediately captured in words, she translates into images that become readable.
— Lieve Shukrani Simoens
Lore Stessel is a Belgian artist born in 1987. She earned a Master’s degree in painting from the Luca School of Arts in Brussels in 2009, then continued her studies at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, graduating in 2012. That same year, her work was recognized with the Louis Roederer Prize. In 2020, she received a grant from the Flemish government for the publication of her first monograph, The Body Will Thrive. In 2024, she published As the Sky Remembers the Sea with Cairo Apartment.
In her photographic work, Lore Stessel explores the intersection of photography and painting, seeking to transcend the boundaries of both. Her creative process is decidedly experimental and embraces the accidental and the unforeseen, elements that enrich the very material of the image and reveal its unexpected dimensions.
The body is central to her work. Fascinated by the beauty of everyday gestures and the power of movement, she develops close collaborations with dancers based on trust and attentive listening. These moments of creation, limited in time, carry the awareness of their fleeting nature, and the image becomes a tangible trace of this ephemerality. The beauty she seeks can also be found in the transformations of matter and landscape—the tremors that shaped rocks, the waves that stir the sea—creating a subtle dialogue between human gesture and natural forces.
In 2025, La Cité Musicale–Metz will present a major retrospective of her work, highlighting more than a decade of research into the body, movement, and the materiality of the image, and confirming the singular place she holds in the contemporary art scene.