Curator's Note:
The Silent Gallery is a fictional institution.
The creatures are not.
The Silent Gallery is not a museum. It has no walls, no permanent collection and no official history. Yet every object presented here is treated as if it had been recovered from a forgotten civilization.
Each mask is sculpted by hand and documented as an archaeological fragment rather than an artwork. The purpose is not to invent monsters, but to imagine what happens when myths leave behind traces instead of stories.
Names, rituals and origins are deliberately uncertain. Like all archives, this collection contains gaps, contradictions and unanswered questions.
Visitors are invited to suspend disbelief for a moment—not to discover fantasy, but to experience what an impossible archive might feel like
About Marc Nis
Marc Nis is a Belgian sculptor and set designer whose practice moves between contemporary art, theatre, cinema and handcrafted mask making.
Before developing his personal body of work, he spent years creating objects, props and environments for stage and screen. This experience shaped his relationship with materials: paper, resin, textiles, pigments and found objects are approached not simply as sculptural media, but as fragments carrying their own history.
In 2011, he received the Magritte Award for Best Production Design for the animated feature A Town Called Panic (Panique au village), a recognition that reflects his longstanding interest in building believable worlds through handcrafted objects.
Today, his practice is centred on mask making. Each piece is entirely handmade and develops through observation, experimentation and accumulation of materials, without relying on digital fabrication
Selected Recognition
2011
Magritte Award — Best Production Design
Panique au village (A Town Called Panic)
Artist Statement
‘I do not collect folklore.
I invent the evidence that folklore once existed.
Each mask is conceived as an artefact recovered from a forgotten culture — weathered, repaired, catalogued and preserved.
The sculpture is only the beginning.
The story begins when someone believes it may have been real.’