The Belgian artist Marijke De Roover, who turned memes into art and never shied away from topics of feminism, sex and gender, died on July 25, at 36 years old.
A crowdfunding campaign has since been launched by her community to preserve her work, Ocula reported on Tuesday. So far, 48 donations totaling €3,684 ($4,292) have been made, with a €10,000 goal. The GoFundMe campaign was started by De Roover’s immediate family, writing that she would describe “herself as a part-time professional karaoke singer and meme connoisseur, although she became widely known for her queer and feminist performance practice.”
The post adds that De Roover worked with “wit, humor and remarkable generosity,” and that her artistic work touched on themes of love, romance, motherhood, the ethics of reproduction, and capitalism.
Marijke De Roover’s Me Calmly Explaining Empathy While Getting Slowly Juiced by Male Fragility Tomato (2025)
Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy of Upstream Gallery Amsterdam.
She created funny, incisive work that left a lasting mark on contemporary art and feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities. De Roover’s family has taken charge of her artistic estate.
Kiosk Gallery in Ghent, Belgium, will be holding a tribute to De Roover on Saturday titled YOU & HER (tribute), where members of the public are invited to celebrate her life through gestures, be it reading a piece of text, sharing an anecdote or story, or singing a song. The commemoration will continue at the artist’s favorite bar, Fatima.
Simon Delobel, director of Kiosk met De Roover in 2013 at KASK School of Arts, where he was part of the jury panel and remembers her as a wunderkind who had always had a sharp eye. “She made an installation on the campus, and she chose a space in front of the cafeteria, which is not normally an exhibition place,” he told ARTnews.
De Roover was an unusual artist, Delobel recalls. She never tried to fit into the local art scene; instead, she focused on music. In 2013, she was on the second season of the Belgian reality talent show The Voice van Vlaanderen. “She was able to sing like nobody else. She always said that she was not so much interested in the art world and its dynamics. What she wanted to do was to start something that everybody would be able to recognize and then bring some political messaging into it. She was extremely engaged, respectful and fascinated by popular culture,” said Delobel.
Marijke De Roover’s Silence Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking. (2026)
Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy of Upstream Gallery Amsterdam.
In 2019, De Roover’s artistic work started getting attention. At Frieze Week in London, she performed Live, Laugh, Limerence (2019–2020), an operatic performance that was showcased at David Roberts Art Foundation event at Ministry of Sound, a nightclub in London. Her work traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp to the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2023, presenting an installation video titled Cum as Your Madness that’s described as a “horror musical comedy that subverts the codes of pornography” and “plunges us into the witchcraft trials and the brutality exercised against women who deviated from societal norms in early modern Europe.”
Before De Roover’s passing, she hosted an open mic evening at Arcade in London titled Pride Speech Karaoke, allowing participants to take to the stage to perform a queer speech, poem, lyric or text.
