Tom Liekens: Salomé

Tom Liekens (b. 1977 in Bonheiden, Belgium) is an Antwerp-based artist whose practice encompasses painting, wood engraving, and collage. He studied Fine Arts, specializing in painting, under Fred Bervoets at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, graduating in 1999. His work brings together art history, nature, mythology, and personal imagination, often exploring desire, power, and loss through imagery that is simultaneously seductive and unsettling.

Salomé draws on the biblical story of Salomé and the figure of the femme fatale to explore desire, obsession, power, and loss. Inspired in particular by Oscar Wilde’s interpretation of Salomé, the work opens onto a wider universe in which mythological, historical, and contemporary references converge. Figures such as Judith, Cleopatra, Actaeon, and Diana appear alongside Naya, the wolf whose return to Flanders became a notable event, creating unexpected connections between cultural history, nature, and personal imagination.

Through paintings and monumental woodcuts, Liekens constructs a world that is both seductive and unsettling. His female figures are presented not as passive characters confined to historical narratives, but as powerful, independent presences who actively shape their own destinies. The work also questions the male gaze, with Liekens inserting himself into the narratives as both the desiring observer and the figure who fails or faces punishment.

Published in connection with the exhibition at Galerie De Zwarte Panter in Antwerp, Salomé offers a richly illustrated encounter with Liekens’s distinctive visual universe, where beauty and threat coexist and vulnerability becomes a form of strength.