JEF GEYS AT GALERIE GRETA MEERT
© Hugard and Vanoverschelde
Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present the fifth solo exhibition of Jef Geys (Leopoldsburg, 1934 – Balen, 2018).
The work of Jef Geys is resolutely local. The Belgian artist conceived and orchestrated his work from Balen, his hometown in the Kempen, a region where he also worked as a primary school teacher between 1960 and 1989. In the 1960s, Geys became the editor of Kempens Informtieblad, a local newspaper that he took over and used as a mean to disseminate information and documentation relating to his work and its socio-political context. Geys’ longstanding interest in superimposing economies of meaning that run counter-intuitively to the pervasive structures of the art world can best be understood through his insistence on locality. In turn, this emphasis on the local and its contingencies come to short-circuit the classist idea of connoisseurship, and afford his work a universal quality — it implies that all publics be treated equally, including those not considered to be at the center of ‘cultural life’.
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