I am an art historian and painting conservator specializing in an appearance-based approach to conservation. I am Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Conservation and Museum Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS), Maastricht University. I am a member of de Jonge Academie (2025–2030) and an associate editor of Art & Perception (Brill) (September 2026). I remain affiliated with the art history department at KU Leuven and I am a member of the PALETTES and Gestalt ReVision research groups in Leuven, Belgium.

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My research develops an appearance-based approach to conservation: one that takes the perceived appearance of an artwork as a primary object of study and care, alongside its material substrate. This is especially pressing for works whose aesthetic effect depends on unstable materials, where physical aging quietly transforms what the viewer actually perceives. Studying appearance in this way is necessarily interdisciplinary: it combines methods from art history, vision science, and conservation studies with emerging technologies such as augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR).

 

This has a direct museological dimension. If aging quietly alters what a work is seen to be, then the museum becomes the site where that shift must be confronted: in deciding which appearance of a work is conserved, exhibited, and labelled, and in recognizing that visual preservation is itself an interpretive act, not a merely technical one. I therefore treat exhibition-making as a mode of research. The museum is, for me, both an object of study, where context effects shape what visitors perceive and how they attribute meaning, and a research environment in which art historical questions can be tested empirically against a broad public.

 

I lead the Interdisciplinary Reconstruction of Art project (IRECONA), which I initiated as a junior postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) at KU Leuven and now continue at Maastricht University. The project examines aging in Color Field painting as an art historical problem and develops a conservation method combining descriptive analysis with visual reconstruction using AR, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp and TU Delft.

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My current research extends these questions to the digitization of art. A digital image is easily taken as a neutral record, yet it too fixes a single appearance rather than registering one neutrally. I examine this along three lines: the fidelity of reproduction, whether a screen can carry the perceived qualities of a work, from color and scale to specific visual appearances (e.g. fluorescence, iridescense) a display cannot render; the digital as an instrument of visual preservation, building on the AR reconstructions I develop within IRECONA; and the museum's mediating role as it extends online, where displaying a collection shapes how a broad public perceives and interprets works.

 

I have been studying fluorescent colors in art since 2010. First, as a conservator, I studied the aging effects of these paints and pigments and conserved some of Frank Stella’s works. Later on, as an art historian, I studied the first uses of fluorescent colors in American art (e.g. Richard I. Bowman, Herbert Aach, Alvin Loving, and Neil Williams). During my Ph.D. (FWO), I specialized in Frank Stella's fluorescent work of the sixties and seventies. For this project, I worked together with the department of Conservation Studies (ARCHES, University of Antwerp) to study the material characteristics of fluorescent colors, and with vision scientists from the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology (Gestalt ReVision, KU Leuven) to conduct perception studies in which we investigated the impact of fluorescent colors in artworks. These studies were used to re-evaluate Frank Stella’s works and the criticism that pertains to them. Through this process, I also focused on the question of how to integrate empirical insights into art history, which resulted in a novel methodology for empirically informed art history.

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This approach informs my work as a research-curator, in which exhibitions double as empirical studies of viewing. In 2019 I curated Tracking Frank Stella in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), an exhibition that scrutinized three of Stella's works through the gaze of 100 participants, using eye-tracking glasses and questionnaires. In 2022 I curated Flattened Intensities – Intensified Flatness at BAC Art Lab (KU Leuven), an exhibition drawing on my doctoral work and featuring the artists Griet Moors, Hannah De Corte, and the Collective Muesli; there too I conducted a viewing study, using eye-tracking and questionnaires, to assess the extent to which viewers can discern the material significance of artworks with and without contextual information. Most recently, in March 2026, I curated Color Field Augmented, again in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum, where I tested the AR reconstructions developed in IRECONA with 105 visitors, in the presence of the original works.

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