Samuel Mareel has been appointed Senior Curator of Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Art at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) in Antwerp. He took up his post on 1 January.

In his new role, Mareel will be responsible for the museum’s extensive collections of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art. In the coming years, he will be charged, among other things, with organizing a major retrospective of Quinten Massijs in 2030, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist.

From 2016 to 2023, Mareel was Curator of Early Modern Art and later Chief Curator at Museum Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen. In Mechelen he organized the exhibitions Call for Justice (2018), on art and law in the Burgundian Netherlands, and Renaissance Children (2021), on education and portraiture at the Habsburg court in Mechelen between 1470 and 1530.

Samuel Mareel specializes in the visual arts and literature of the Burgundian and early Habsburg Netherlands. He has published extensively on the culture of the rederijkers in the Netherlands and on the relationship between literature and the visual arts. He received his Ph.D. from Ghent University in 2007, where he continue to be a guest lecturer in the Department of Literature. He has held postdoctoral positions at Ghent University, UC Berkeley, the University of Groningen, and the Queen Mary University of London. He was a member of The Young Academy from 2013 to 2018.

Samuel Mareel is a member of CODART since 2016 and serves on the Program Committee since 2023.