The Cuckoo in the Artistic Nest. The Work of Jef Geys

The Flemish art-tsar Jan Hoet is said to have once called him ‘more a social worker than an artist’. It seems that after that relations between Hoet and Jef Geys never really recovered. The fact is that, throughout his long career, Geys has tried to erase the boundary between art and everyday life.

Whether they paint, take photographs or make films, artists ‘question the representation of reality, the status of the artwork, or the mechanisms of the art world’. These are stopgaps that recur frequently in writings on contemporary art, so often in fact that the word ‘question’ has lost all its bite. But if there is one Flemish artist who has made ‘questioning’ - raising things fot discussion - his hobbyhorse, it is Jef Geys.