Produced on the occasion of gerlach en koop, Was machen Sie um zwei? Ich schlafe, at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 19 September 2020–28 February, 2021. In an exhibition at the edge of sleep gerlach en koop display works by Ismaïl Bahri, Kasper Bosmans, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Mark Geffriaud, Voebe de Gruyter, Ian Kiaer, Kitty Kraus, Gabriel Kuri, Rita McBride, Guy Mees, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Helen Mirra, Laurent Montaron, Melvin Moti, Jean-Luc Moulène, Henrik Olesen, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Emilio Prini, Bojan Šarčević, Shimabuku, Steve Van den Bosch, and a contribution by writer Haytham El-Wardany

Available to download here.

Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterised by a formal rigour combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.

Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterised by a formal rigour combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.

Guy Mees used the enigmatic title Lost Space to describe two major bodies of work, distinct in origin and form, and separated by a gap of more than twenty years: the geometric objects and panels covered in lace created in the 1960s, and the works he started producing in the 1980s featuring colour paper cutouts pinned to walls. This publication is dedicated to a lesser-known chapter in this story: the writing process of a short text entitled, likewise, The Lost Space. An ambiguous manifesto for Mees’ work, the text went through a number of revisions, with Mees contributing suggestions, but never authoring it himself. This book reproduces eight extant versions of the text for the first time, in facsimile and typographic transcription. Edited by Lilou Vidal. Designed by Joris Kritis. Limited edition of 350 copies.

Guy Mees (1935–2003) is a Belgian artist whose oeuvre encompasses photographs, videos, sculptures, and fragile works on paper that combine formal rigor with delicacy and a conceptual approach. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind a body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied arts.

Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterized by a formal rigor combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.

The Weather is Quiet, Cool, and Soft is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (February 1–April 8, 2018), and at Mu.ZEE, Ostend (November 25, 2018–March 10, 2019). Borrowed from a note the artist jotted down on one of his works on paper, the title pays homage to the atmospheric impermanence of Mees’s works, as well as his infra-ordinary, relativistic, and poetic approach.

Edited by Lilou Vidal. Texts by François Piron, Fernand Spillemaeckers, Lilou Vidal, Wim Meuwissen, Dirk Snauwaert, Micheline Szwajcer. Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien. Designed by Joris Kritis.

Lilou Vidal, curator of the exhibition and François Piron, art critic, curator and editor, to discuss Guy Mees’ work here.

Poster produced on the occasion of Guy Mees: The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft at MuZEE, Oostende, 24 November, 2018–10 March, 2019. The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft presented works from different stages in the career of the Belgium artist Guy Mees (1935–2003) to shed light on his intuitive and conceptual approach. The selected works ranged from early lace pieces generically entitled Lost Space to the films and the photographs of the series of portraits Difference of Levels, never before shown structuralist works from the 1970s, pastel on paper series from the mid-1970s and paper cut-outs from the 1980s. Together, these allow a study of Mees’s practice and his ideas of mutability, fragility, porosity and the expansion of pictorial space into social space. The title of the exhibition (taken from a note by the artist) is a reference to the atmospheric impermanence in Mees’s work and his relativist poetical approach.