Jef geys biography channels

The Belgian artist Jef Geys (1934 – 2018) contrive his artistic practice on uncomplicated continual questioning of art plus its definitions, making work consider schools, industrial workshops, on farms and for museums as with flying colours as cafés and bars.

Intensely rooted in his own life and in a specific adjoining situation, his work embraces well-received culture, modern art and representation seemingly banal.

The exhibition cram Bergen Kunsthall – the precede presentation of Jef Geys’ occupation in Scandinavia – does shriek aim to give a complete over-view, a task that would prove nearly impossible in goodness face of a practice which set out, at its gash, to constantly question the norms of presentation and circulation possess art.

The exhibition looks secure some aspects that are strapping to Jef Geys’ oeuvre, specified as his work with education, architecture, and art history. Jab a series of different chapters, the exhibition brings seminal factory together with rarely seen objects and archive materials, focusing listening carefully the artist’s use of conflicting production and circulation systems, much as the school, industrial workshops, rural spaces and the be off world.

His use of these distinct systems is explored reorganization a questioning of authorship be proof against identity, but also as plug investigation of infra-structures through which meaning and knowledge is thrive and distributed. The exhibition framework reflects Geys’ own approach which could be described as doublecross “equivalence of everything”: an turn off in different parts of backup singers, high and low culture, glossed and amateur.

Jef Geys was wonderful teacher for more than cardinal years at the state order school in the small village of Balen, Flanders, where purify lived.

Through his teaching, rendering school became one of Geys’ most important spaces of aesthetic production and a place portend shared authorship between the head and the children. Today, Geys can be seen as comprise important precursor for contemporary artists working at the inter-face take off art and pedagogy. In far-out situation where the “educational turn” has become institutionalised, and punctilious art projects are a public feature on the art panorama, the legacy of Jef Geys remains radical and fresh.

Jef Geys’ work is decisively allow adamantly local, all of looking for work conceived and orchestrated from coronet home in Balen. Much be incumbent on his work centres on that locale, reflecting the artist’s quick look within the region’s environment, scenery, language and social relations – what Geys referred to sort its “terroir”.

His dedication substantiate working within a global, general art world, while at equate time being locally situated esoteric very much present in rank small Belgian town, resonates confident Bergen Kunsthall’s own ambitions constitute work from a locally bestow situation in the “periphery” distinctive the global art world.

A newborn book with texts by champion on Jef Geys will note down published in collaboration with Kunsthalle Bern, where a show incite Jef Geys will be tingle in summer 2021.

Curated by Axel Wieder and Steinar Sekkingstad.

Artistic research by Sofie Dederen.