A fascination with (childhood) memories, dreams and the question of how we should now deal with the unreliability of our own memory is the common thread in the painting and drawing oeuvre of Belgian artist Gideon Kiefer. On a second level, Kiefer’s work reads rather socially critical. In the layering of his works, the artist displays an apocalyptic atmosphere linked to the growing climate crisis. Landscapes caught under a bell jar or carefully placed in a monumental architectural structure, trees stripped bare to brittle branches, ... These are just some of the many metaphors depicting this calamity. In the Paardenstallen, Kiefer literally takes the visitor to the Neerpelt woods of his youth.

The book will accompany Kiefers exhibition ‘I’m Lost in a Forest’ at Be-Part Courtrai (Belgium), 07/10/23 – 07/01/24.

Throughout his oeuvre, Kiefer (°1970) creates his own distinctive universe, filled with intimate and peculiar scenes, which are a symbiosis of reality and the imaginary, based on the artist’s memories and the distrust towards the accuracy of these memories. Although this personal aspect forms the leitmotif in his body of work, on a second level, his drawings and paintings consistently show great consciousness and criticism towards geo-politics and the current global ecological situation, which the artist preferably depicts in a more metaphorical manner.