The museum looks back on its 25 years of existence through photos, archive material, an overview of exhibitions and highlights, and video interviews with honorary curators Roland Jooris and Piet Coessens, among others. Special attention is also paid to the architecture, a design by Stéphane Beel, and the building history of the Roger Raveel Museum.

The year concludes with MONOS. Artist Museums: Shrines and Reflections, an exhibition in the rectory wing of the Roger Raveel Museum that examines the architecture of the monographic museum. Using interesting examples from Belgium and its neighbouring countries, it shows the particular and the typical of their buildings and their histories.

The exhibition Emptiness surrounding me focuses on a number of curious, often underexposed motifs in Roger Raveel's oeuvre. One of these concerns the boundaries and scale of the painting, and the way the image relates to the space in which it is displayed. Not infrequently, Raveel plays with those specific dimensions: he opens or breaks the image with windows, vistas, large colour zones and white squares. The painting expands into its surroundings. How to understand this spatiality, Raveel leaves to the viewer. Is it a kind of emptiness? Or an ‘absence’ of matter, a portal between the viewer and the painter? A walk past rarely shown works lets visitors reflect on this.

Opening: Sunday 11 February 2024, 11am-5pm Curator: Carlos Alleene As the story goes, there is a strong woman next to every important artist. Zulma De Nijs was everything to Roger Raveel. Or, as Hugo Claus, the long-time family friend, put it in that one line from his poem Voor de poort [In front of the gate]: 'To be present, that is enough.' And she has been, both in the artist's life and in his oeuvre.

Curator: Melanie Deboutte Roger Raveel Museum will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2024. A quarter of a century ago, Raveel opened his dream museum, the place where his most important works would be cherished and displayed. The Roger Raveel Museum's collection consists of more than 800 pieces, including 260 paintings and over 500 drawings, carefully chosen by the Machel painter. To mark this anniversary, the exposition The essence brings together a selection of works in museum halls designed by architect Stéphane Beel in close consultation with the artist. Roger Raveel Museum is one of the first museums in our country built for its fundamental function: displaying art.

At the invitation of the museum, a group of contemporary artists enter into dialogue with the Roger Raveel, his works and his museum, the village and the many stories involved. The artists, none of whom are exclusively focussed on the medium of painting, create a new work for this occasion. Participating artists: Kasper De Vos, Maud Gourdon, Sophie Nys, Marina Pinsky, Juan Pablo Plazas, Leander Schönweger, Filip Van Dingenen & David Shongo, Ken Verhoeven and Yue Yuan. Curator: Melanie Deboutte Opening: Sunday 30 June 2024, 11am - 5pm

Opening: Sunday, 8 October 2023, 11 am - 5 pm To mark the centenary year of the artist Maurice Wyckaert’s birth, the Roger Raveel Museum presents Informal Expressions. This exhibition brings together works made between 1955 and 1963 by Maurice Wyckaert (1923–1996) and Roger Raveel (1921–2013) who were contemporaries and friends. For both painters, this was a critical period of development in their oeuvres and in their lives. In their experiments with colour, brushstroke and format they sought to usher in a new, fresh and free kind of painting.

Since its opening in 1999, the Roger Raveel Museum has housed an extensive collection of paintings, drawings and objects by Roger Raveel (1921-2013). Since 2020, annually changing collection presentations offer a broader insight into the rich oeuvre of the artist. This exhibition is entitled Nothing, Light and Things, referring to a bibliophile edition from 1991 with etchings by Roger Raveel and poems by Roland Jooris, first director of this museum and close friend of the artist. In addition to the publication, this exhibition features a selection of paintings and drawings from different periods. Raveel never left his native village of Machelen-aan-de-Leie, his habitat that provided him with the inspiration to grow and evolve his pioneering work. We recognize the kitchen where Raveel's wife Zulma does the housework, a cactus on the table and the view of the garden with its typical concrete posts and walls. We see the artist's father doing a chore or taking a rest at the window as well as the cat that keeps him company. The lines of the fields and the farmland alternate with the village scenes: the football field, the bicycle against the garden wall. The painter himself also appears in two striking self-portraits. “The things in the world” relate to each other in an enigmatic and at the same time uncomplicated structure. Raveel shapes them in his very own language, his recognizable colour palette and clear compositions. He combines bright areas of colour and silhouettes of figures and objects with abstract, expressive paint strokes, mysterious squares and objects from reality that are mounted on the painted surface: a symbiosis of life and art. Nothing, Light and Things is dedicated to Luc Levrau, co-founder and inspirer of the Roger Raveel Museum, bosom friend and right-hand man of Roger Raveel and Zulma De Nijs.

Opening: Sunday 16 april 2023, 11 am - 5 pm