The work of an artist is plain to see. Hung on the wall or arranged on the floor it speaks of its creator’s intentions and skills.

What usually is not so clear is the enormous difference that can be made by a curator… the person who organises an exhibition, sets its theme, arranges the display and ensures that everything necessary to enjoy the show is put in place — sympathetic lighting, clear labels, an informative catalogue that sets the work in context.

An average curator hangs the pictures and hopes you like them. They become an accumulation of art, not a considered exhibition.

A good curator can by thoughtful juxtapositions draw out resonances in the works that you might otherwise have missed.

But a truly brilliant curator can raise an excellent show to the level of one that lives in the memory for years, enriching your life.

Through the way the artworks are presented, such a curator can give them new dimensions, spark fresh ideas, create additional layers of excitement and enable them to lift your spirits.

I saw just such a show last week. It was held at the residence of the Belgian Ambassador to Kenya, M. Bart Ouvry, ostensibly to celebrate that nation’s King’s Day.

It runs for one more week, to next Sunday. Access is by invitation only, although the ambassador ensured many schools were encouraged to visit.

Such is this exhibition’s importance that I hope it will be extended or that a new venue will be found.

Entitled Funika-Fufuka (Cover-Recover) it was curated by Gonda Geets, a Belgian artist who lives in Nairobi. Two years ago she organised the first and highly successful mixed exhibition by Kenyan artists at the Safaricom HQ in Nairobi.

Funika-Fufuka’s theme is what the catalogue calls the history of humanity, with all the nuances of pain and healing, vulnerability and violence that entails.

It carries a similar message to the Kenya Burning show at the old PC’s House in Nairobi city centre which, with its photographs documenting the post-election violence, bears the obvious message, “Never again.”

But whereas Kenya Burning was explicit, polemic and brutal, Funika-Fufuka is broader in its outlook and more subtle while being every bit as persuasive. In the process, Geets has pulled off two clear coups.

The first is a coup d’theatre with the first thing to confront visitors — and confront is the operative word — a major sculpture by the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere.

It was borrowed from the Contemporary Art Museum in Antwerp and is a lifesize representation of a horse on its back, legs in the air and head twisted against its body.

Raised on a steel trestle and made of horse skin stretched over a polyester cast this horse could be enjoying a roll in the dust. But look more carefully. It is dead. And a dead horse is a lot of death.

The eyes are missing – a characteristic of De Bruyckere’s work which turns the viewer into voyeur, able to look without being seen.

The piece, called In Flanders Fields, commemorates the one million or so horses killed in the First World War, partly specifically but also more generally as a metaphor of disgust at the waste wrought by war. Or, indeed, ethnic clashes.

The second coup is also sculpture, the first showing of a group of steel cut-out figures by the Kenyan artist Peterson Kamwathi.

Called Study for Monument to an Incomplete Rainbow, they are based on his well-known queue drawings, the shapes of the steel copied from his ink drawings and echoing precisely the weight and balance of their brush strokes.

The huddle of six people on the polished drawing room floor is a queue come to life as the brightly painted figures crowd around and appear to mutter among themselves.

The temptation would have been to arrange them in a physical queue, say on the lawn, but by grouping them the artist — and curator — have related them directly to some of Kamwathi’s earlier studies of sheep, each retaining their sense of self yet each part of the flock, thus highlighting wider issues of individuality and collective responsibility.

This is the study, the figures some 4ft (120cm) high. In the final piece, yet to be made, each figure will be more than 7ft tall ((214cm).

The intelligence of the curator’s hand can also be seen in the presentation of 43 expressionist heads by Jesse Ng’ang’a under his nom d’art Ehoodi Kichapi.

They were conceived as individual examples of urban angst but displayed en masse they take on new meaning.

Forty-two of these screaming heads are hung around the arch of a doorway, through which can be glimpsed a much larger canvas, the 43rd, again of a skull.

The paintings were brought together by Geets as one installation specially for this show. With their new collective title — 42 Plus 1 Burnt Heads — the smaller pieces now each represent one of the 42 tribes of Kenya, while the large one glimpsed through the arch stands for that strange separate tribe to which belong all politicians.

Subtle warnings are seldom clearer than this.

Nine other artists are exhibiting. They are Fitsum Berhe with two large introspective portraits, James Muriuki (a lightbox), Dennis Muraguri (a construction in steel, wood and paper) and Geets herself (paintings, plus plaster casts of her own clenched fists).

Then there is Beatrice Wanjiku (a searing head), Gor Soudan (a large ink drawing and plastic and wire sculptures of his half-ant-half-bird fantasy figures), John Kamicha (two mixed media pictures of men brandishing guns) and Xavier Verhoest, who contributes two photo-based paintings, one of a rose, the other of the curving edge of the Earth.

Finally, Eltayeb Daw Elbait shows three heads, scratched, gouged and chiselled from wooden boards; intense drawings that seem to be wrought from pain.

All these are substantial works by artists clearly at the top of their game, but it is the coherent way they have been projected that makes a visit so worthwhile.

The exhibition is dynamic and provocative; a model of how to do it.

It offers a range of approaches to the oldest idea of all — our ultimate mortality — from artists we thought we knew, in a fresh and invigorating way. It also highlights artists from different continents presenting a united view of the fate of humanity.

This is an exhibition of today but it carries a legacy from the distant past, dealing with universal issues that concerned the Old Masters too.

On a table are several books about the Belgian De Bruyckere. One is open at a painting by the Reformation artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, who along with the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, is her inspiration.

It was completed around 1520 (no-one is really sure of the exact date) and shows the Risen Christ deathly white, bearing vivid slashes of the stigmata, in his hands the scourge.

It is an image of death and redemption, precisely encapsulating the theme of this brilliant show.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi. Email: [email protected]