Since his beginnings in the 1950s, Jef Geys has flouted the established limits between minor and major art, culture and trivia, intimate and collective, through a continually evolving œuvre. Ten years after his major solo exhibition at the IAC, Jef Geys returns to the Institut with two separate projects based on questioning our society’s hegemonic systems: Le Tour de France 1969 d’Eddy Merckx and Les plantes médicinales.
Le Tour de France 1969 d’Eddy Merckx is a series of photographs from the Tour made by Jef Geys at the wheel of his Citroën 2CV during the ascension of one of the greatest racing cyclists in history. Geys covers the entire race, following Merckx every step of the way, through stages, breaks, and cocktail parties. Between intimacy and celebrity, these photographs, as much sociological as they are ethnographic or artistic, interrogate the advent of a historic figure poised against normative media representations. After the CAPC in Bordeaux, Les Bains-Douches in Alençon, the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages in Troyes, Le Tour de France 1969 d’Eddy Merckx comes to the IAC, where, since 2007, the artist has cultivated a close and fruitful relationship.
Continuing the process of touring and archiving inherent in the development of Jef Geys’s oeuvre, the artist is initiating his series Les Plantes médicinales at the IAC. In 2007, at the same time as his solo exhibition, Geys began to collect plants from the streets of Villeurbanne. This primordial practice, the act of gathering, was repeated in New York, Moscow, and Brussels, becoming the cornerstone of the artist’s exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 2009. Returning to Villeurbanne for this edition, Les Plantes médicinales leads us to reconsider our immediate environment according to alternative logics. Ignoring any distinction between organic and urban, this evolving work interrogates us as to our knowledge of the living world, inviting us to repair the bonds that unite us to it.
Continuing the process of touring and archiving inherent in the development of Jef Geys’s oeuvre, the artist is initiating his series Les Plantes médicinales at the IAC. In 2007, at the same time as his solo exhibition, Geys began to collect plants from the streets of Villeurbanne. This primordial practice, the act of gathering, was repeated in New York, Moscow, and Brussels, becoming the cornerstone of the artist’s exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 2009. Returning to Villeurbanne for this edition, Les Plantes médicinales leads us to reconsider our immediate environment according to alternative logics. Ignoring any distinction between organic and urban, this evolving work interrogates us as to our knowledge of the living world, inviting us to repair the bonds that unite us to it.
