‘There was a whole mystical thing that occurred,’ Thomas Houseago says, when we speak ahead of his solo show at Xavier Hufkens gallery. He is talking about a serendipitous, maybe even ordained, series of events that led to Cosmic Snail (Shell Temple) (2025), his immersive new installation that will debut in Brussels in March. First, there was the beaten-up Swedish lifeguard boat that Houseago swam out to meet, off the coast of Malibu, where the artist lives and works. With his friend, the boat’s owner, he sailed to a swamp beach covered in shells of all shapes and colors – an embarrassment of riches. He chose just five to bring home, including a snail’s shell that, when he looked at it, reminded him of the cosmos, wormholes, and spiral galaxies.

He was still thinking about snails and cosmic shapes when he traveled to Kunstgiesserei St.Gallen, the Swiss foundry with which he works closely. It’s quiet and secluded there, a good place to experiment, and he did just that with an ice cream scoop and a pile of clay, making a strange spiral. He didn’t like the result, and told Felix Lehner, the founder of Kunstgiesserei, to scrap it.

Then it got even more uncanny: Houseago traveled to Brussels to plan for his upcoming show. While he was walking through Hufkens’ flagship gallery, a spacious six-story venue, a vision of a snail flashed through his head as he stood in the sophisticated first floor room. Later, at lunch, Hufkens mentioned that he’d imagined a snail-shaped sculpture in that gallery too – a coincidence that was hard to brush off.

The artist and gallerist then traveled back to Switzerland together, where Lehner showed them a cast of the tossed off, Fibonacci sequence-like clay sculpture Houseago had made. ‘I see this as monumental,’ Hufkens said, big enough that a person could walk inside it. Soon they’d envisioned a story-high, room-sized, textured Styrofoam maze – a shape viewers could enter and wander through – a labyrinth that also felt like a sanctuary. ‘The cosmic snail is many things,’ Hufkens reflects – ‘also a metaphor for life with Thomas Houseago.’

They met in 1996, thirty years ago, when Houseago had just moved to Brussels and Hufkens was nine years into running the gallery he’d launched as a 22-year-old. They both remember it vividly. Houseago’s former teacher, the conceptual sculptor Didier Vermeiren, had set up the meeting. The studio was open; ‘I pushed the door and he was sculpting,’ recalls Hufkens. The artist, who worked with a saw, was next to a heap of wood shavings and sawdust. Hufkens ran up, climbed onto the heap and looked at the artworks around him from that vantage point. Houseago thought it looked like the gallerist was asking himself, ‘What the hell is this?’

‘I was completely bewildered,’ Hufkens says. The mid-1990s were a moment in which control was paramount and minimalist aesthetics still reigned, and yet this art was raw, guttural, and messy, with hefty figures fighting their way into existence. Houseago was omnivorous in his choice of references: mythology, modernism, Auguste Rodin, Paul McCarthy, Louise Bourgeois. Hufkens loved it, so he bought some sculptures on the spot. ‘I could feel he got it,’ says Houseago, who for the first time thought he might be able to make it in the art world. ‘He views art in a very sacred way,’ he adds of the man who has now been his dealer and colleague for three decades.

In the early 1990s, Houseago left Leeds, his hometown in the north of England, for London, where he studied at Central Saint Martins. But the YBAs, who married sleekness with shock tactics, were ascendant in the capital at the time, and he found a much more welcoming community in Amsterdam, where he went to study at De Ateliers. From there he moved to Brussels because it was not London, and because it was affordable – although nothing is affordable when you have no money at all. By buying some sculptures, Hufkens had offered the young artist a lifeline. Houseago was included in his first exhibition at the gallery in 1998: a summer group show in which his plaster Untitled (crouching figure) (1998), headless and handless, leaned unsteadily forward to face a wall-mounted stack of shiny aluminum cubes by Donald Judd. The stark contrast made Houseago’s unruly approach to materials – the uneven, lumpy plaster, the feet thick and under-rendered, while the chest muscles were defined – all the more palpable. 

When Houseago moved from Brussels to Los Angeles in 2003, Hufkens assured him they would stay in touch, but the artist didn’t expect his gallerist to travel across the ocean so faithfully. Hufkens offered Houseago a kind of steadiness he hadn’t imagined, and the artist opened up a new world for his gallerist. ‘Thomas became a reason to go to LA,’ says Hufkens. ‘And then that developed into relationships with other artists.’ He would visit Houseago’s studio, then explore further afield, eventually adding Sterling Ruby, Paul McCarthy, and Lesley Vance to his roster.

Houseago’s fortunes shifted as the 2000s became the 2010s. In Miami, the Rubells began collecting his work and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York included his nine-foot-tall crouching Baby (2009-2010) in the 2010 biennial. It wasn’t so much that the work had changed, as the way it was received in the art world, and Houseago was able to forge relationships with a handful of prominent international galleries. Through it all, Hufkens remained constant, arranging institutional shows and acquisitions, showing imposing skulls, carved and cast owls, smooth plaster eggs on rough wooden pedestals, and all the imposing, striding, and crouching men, sometimes headless, other times with skulls for faces.

In 2020, the death of Houseago’s father prompted a resurgence of trauma – preverbal memories of sexual abuse at the hands of the patriarch that were so unbearable he broke down. He spent time at a treatment center in Arizona and wasn’t sure he would live, let alone make art again. It was his beloved therapist Danny Smith who encouraged him to try. Smith, who passed unexpectedly in 2024, had also recommended that Houseago move near the ocean, far from the denser parts of the city that he had previously inhabited. So, once ensconced in Malibu, he started looking for beauty. He had never identified as a painter, and the paintings he had done tended to be dense, haunted images that featured fragmented and disorienting skulls. Painting flowers was one of the most difficult undertakings of his career. He rendered spider’s webs woven onto native plants with the moon shimmering over the evening water. The paintings still had a familiar texture and gestural intensity, yet most of his dealers balked.

Not Hufkens. In the autumn of 2020, the gallery mounted ‘Recovery Works’, a quiet show of these new paintings, followed by an exhibition of large-scale ‘Vision Paintings’ at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels in 2021. ‘I don’t care what anyone does,’ Houseago remembers Hufkens telling him. ‘I love them. I believe in them. I understand them.’ Hufkens expands, ‘I can only work with people that I have had a total admiration for. It’s okay to see them also have a breakdown.’ There’s something else too: he wants his artists to have the freedom to change, to evolve. ‘We don’t live in a land of freedom these days,’ he says, ‘and I want my artists to be in a land of freedom. I think it’s important that the gallery is a place where they can be what they want.’

The new show, aptly titled ‘Journey’, consists of all new work and yet references three decades of collaboration. It’s ‘a celebration,’ Hufkens says. On the lower ground floor viewers enter into a gathering of eggs, the warm and womblike forms Houseago has been making for years. One, Large Egg (for Lovers) (2025), is just big enough for two people to squeeze inside. For Houseago, this gallery conjures ‘that feeling of being broken and being reborn, being inside or not inside, this hypervulnerability.’

On the ground floor, there are sage-like, weathered owls, another motif Houseago has returned to repeatedly, and a series of paintings – purple abysses layered and painted out repeatedly with an image of a skull floating on the surface, above the impenetrable thickness of the paint. Giant Striding Figure (Van Gogh on the Road to Arles) (2025), a looming, lumbering redwood man with his face jagged and flattened by the chainsaw, occupies a gallery all of its own. But it is the Cosmic Snail that best captures the exhibition’s ethos, resulting as it did from a symbiotic mind-meld between gallerist, fabricator, and artist. There is a moment, as you wander through the rooms, when you encounter total darkness, the light blocked by the sculpture’s contours and protrusions. Houseago didn’t design this – at least not knowingly – but it feels fated: a spiritual moment of quiet before the journey continues.