Background
Guy Mees was born in 1935 in Mechelen, Antwerpen, Belgium.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
painting
Imaginair Ballet
Lost Space
Lost Space
Untitled
Lost space
Lost Space
Untitled (kn-009)
Untitled
Lost Space
Uitgesneden plint
Lost Space
Untitled
Imaginair Ballet
Lost space
Untitled
Guy Mees
Edit ProfileCareer
Guy Mees started his career as a painter in Antwerp in the late 1950s, when postwar avant-garde art from the US and several Western European countries began to find its way to Belgium. His first mature works were a series of black charcoal paintings that could equally be considered reliefs.
Between 1960 - 1967, Mees produced an extensive oeuvre with factory-made lace and neon lights in various flat and three-dimensional compositions. They are all called "Verloren Ruimte" (Lost Space). Around 1970, Mees experimented with performance and video. In the 1970s, Mees also randomly arranged small pastel-colored paper sticks on sheets of transparent paper, forming something of a precarious rhythmic equation. Those summary compositions got their relief through cast shadow effects, and let themselves be agitated by the flow of air. Sometimes, Mees punctuates the transparent sheets with pastel or felt pen stippling, a kind of vestige of a subjectivist gestural. In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Mees mostly worked on, or with, paper. In 1983, he re-used the title "Verloren Ruimte"; he saw his site-specific variations with colored silk paper or metal foil as another type of 'lost space.'
Mees's work was systematic, but the system was created in the work itself. With the exception of a short text in "Flash Art" in 1973, he never commented on or explained his work, probably because he considered spoken and written words as too definitive for what he intended for his artistic praxis. The accuracy of the work – intertwining elements of painting, sculpture, and performance, which emphasizes the importance of color, texture and space experience – is altogether different from a merely adequate verbal ‘definition.’ The artist died on March 8, 2003.
Achievements
Works
painting
Views
Guy Mees adhered to the artistic traditions of Post-Minimalism. He had a non-authoritarian attitude and conceptual approach to deconstructing any form of classification. Guy Mees’ photographs, videos, and above all his fragile paper-works characterize formal rigor combined with sensitivity and delicacy.
Membership
Guy was a member of New Flemish School.
References
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Guy Mees
1993
