With Nobelprize winner D.Shechtman and Luc Van Meervelt, KU LEUVEN and General Secretary and Treasurer (GST) of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). 

GLORIA QUINT

Gloria Quint is the artist name of Belgian visual artist and sculptor Sabine Allaeys, a non-linear artist whose practice moves across sculpture, visual storytelling, digital culture and science communication. Based in Brussels, she has spent her career exploring what happens when disciplines, technologies and ways of seeing collide — with a particular fascination for the natural world, the intelligence of forms and the primal forces that connect human beings to other living creatures.

Trained in applied arts at St Lucas Ghent and in art history and archaeology at Ghent University, Allaeys developed early on an interest in the relationship between image, meaning and human perception. Her trajectory, however, was never confined to a single medium. In the 1990s she created an innovation and communication practice in Brussels, working across identity, advertising and visual communication. She subsequently became a pioneer of mobile digital culture with MiniFizz, an avatar-based universe for girls developed at a time when mobile games were still in their infancy. Over more than a decade, the project evolved alongside mobile technology, moving from black-and-white pixel graphics to sophisticated full-colour digital worlds. This experience left a lasting imprint on her approach to visual language: technology is not an end in itself, but a tool for creating new forms of experience.

Her parallel interest in science led to another distinctive chapter in her practice. Through hand-drawn animated films and visual storytelling, Allaeys has collaborated with researchers and scientific institutions to translate complex research into accessible visual narratives. Her projects have addressed subjects ranging from genomics and tuberculosis research to climate change, biotechnology and cellular mechanisms, working with scientists and researchers connected to institutions including KU Leuven, UCLouvain and the University of Antwerp. Her work has also involved conversations with internationally recognised scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman. Rather than simply illustrating scientific information, she approaches drawing as a form of thinking — a way of making invisible processes, relationships and ideas perceptible. 

This same impulse increasingly led her back towards physical matter.

As Gloria Quint, Allaeys now works primarily as a sculptor, creating animal sculptures in bronze, resin and other materials. Her AOA — Awakening of Art collection consists of minimalist, limited-edition animal forms that hover between figuration and abstraction. Horses, rams, bears, deer, birds and other creatures are reduced to their essential physical presence. Their surfaces are deliberately smooth and tactile; their compact dimensions give them a paradoxical monumental quality. The works have been described as "mini-monumental", while their relationship to primitive and prehistoric representations of animals points towards a more ancient visual language — one concerned less with depicting an animal than with capturing its essence, force and presence.

For Quint, the animal is therefore not simply a subject. It becomes an archetype, a vessel for something that precedes language: instinct, movement, vulnerability, strength, resonance and connection. Her sculptures seek to reactivate the sensory dimension of looking. They are objects to be approached, touched and experienced rather than merely observed from a distance. A plea for solid softness.

This interest in the essential form is visible throughout her practice. Titles such as U.R.S.U.S., R.A.M., T.O.R.O., V.A.L.K.A., C.A.L.I.X. and H.O.R.S.E — The Horse With No Name suggest an attempt to move away from individual identity towards something more archetypal. The works are deliberately stripped of narrative detail, allowing gesture, silhouette, volume and surface to carry the meaning. The resulting forms can appear simultaneously contemporary and strangely ancient. Her sculptures have been exhibited in Belgium and France and in Sweden through Nordic Art Agency, including the 2025 solo exhibition SOULSONG in Malmö. Her bronze editions have also appeared at auction in Paris. Her work is in private collections in Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and the US.

Underlying these different chapters is a consistent fascination with translation: translating the invisible into the visible, complexity into image, movement into form, and experience into something that can be shared. Quint searches for the essential structure beneath appearances.

Her current sculptural practice represents not a departure from her earlier work, but a return to something more fundamental. After decades spent moving between technology, communication, science and visual culture, she has increasingly turned towards matter, nature and reconnecting with the senses . Bronze offers permanence and weight; the animal offers archetypal force; touch reconnects the viewer with a form of perception that contemporary visual culture often suppresses.

Gloria Quint's work ultimately occupies a space between the contemporary and the primordial. It asks what remains when information, narrative and convention are stripped away — and whether a simple form can still carry something ancient, physical and deeply human.

MINIFIZZ Mobile universe enabling empowerment for young girls

ART EXHIBITIONS