Threads That Echo: Berend Strik at Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels

Threads That Echo

In the autumn of 2025 Berend Strik showed Threads That Echo at Hopstreet Gallery in Brussels, his first exhibition with the gallery. The title is open and a little enigmatic, and the work makes its meaning clear. Strik sews directly into photographic prints, and the thread carries a charge that the image on its own cannot hold.

Strik has worked this way for more than thirty years. He photographs interiors, bodies, buildings and gardens, then returns to the print with needle and thread, fabric and paint. The stitching is not decoration laid on top of a picture. It reopens the image, slows it down, and asks the viewer to look again at what a photograph usually settles too quickly.

In Brussels that method felt especially at home. Thread echoes: it repeats a line, doubles a contour, and leaves a small shadow on the surface. Where the camera records in an instant, the needle records in hours. The two timescales meet in a single work, and the result holds both the speed of seeing and the patience of making.

For an audience meeting Strik's work for the first time, Threads That Echo was a clear introduction to an artist who treats the photograph as a beginning rather than an end.