Michaël Borremans was born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium. In 1996, he received his M.F.A. from Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst, Campus St. Lucas, in Ghent. David Zwirner has represented the artist's works since 2001. Previous solo exhibitions at the gallery include Black Mould (London, 2015) The Devil's Dress (New York, 2011), Taking Turns (New York, 2009), Horse Hunting (New York, 2006), and Trickland (New York, 2003).

Borremans's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of prominent institutions. Most recently, Michaël Borremans: Fixture, was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015-2016. A major museum survey, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, which included one hundred works from the past two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. The exhibition traveled later in the year to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, followed by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2015. Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist's first museum solo show in Japan, was also on view in 2014 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Michael Bracewell published three novels and three novellas between 1988 and 1999. He has since written extensively on modern and contemporary art and culture, and is a contributor to Burlington and frieze magazines. His recent publications include The Rise of David Bowie 1972-1973 (Taschen, 2016), Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work (National Gallery, 2010), and a short story, The Way Ahead (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2018).

He was co-curator of The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978-1988 at Kunstverein Muenchen and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2006 and The Dark Monarch: British Modernism and the Occult at Tate St Ives in 2009. His selected writings on visual art, The Space Between , were published by Ridinghouse, London in 2011.