Joris Ghekiere (1955-2016) was a Belgian artist whose singular vision and restless experimentation earned him a distinctive place in contemporary art. Born in Kortrijk, Belgium, in 1955, he developed over four decades a body of work that continually questioned the nature of painting, the status of the image, and the very idea of beauty in art.
Ghekiere’s work resists easy categorization. Rather than adhere to one style or methodology, he embraced a wide range of techniques and visual languages that blended figuration and abstraction. Internet imagery, personal photographs, and found sources often served as starting points, but his treatment of these motifs was anything but straightforward. Through unexpected colour combinations, unusual compositional choices, and a willingness to distort and subvert conventional forms of beauty, Ghekiere’s paintings challenge the viewer’s expectations at every turn.
Irony and self-reflection were central to Ghekiere’s artistic philosophy. While he could produce virtuoso painterly surfaces — lush with texture, vivid colour, and complex layering — his images frequently flirt with artificiality and ambiguity. Classical symbols of beauty and motifs such as plants, portraits, folk dancers, or everyday scenes are re-presented in ways that question their authenticity and cultural resonance. In doing so, he played with what he once described with a wry modesty: “It’s just a painting.”
Throughout his career, Ghekiere also maintained a deep interest in works on paper. He amassed an extensive archive of sketches, collages, drawings, watercolours, and other paper-based pieces created both in his studio and during his extensive travels. A pivotal journey through Asia in 1990-1991 — spanning countries like the Philippines, China, Pakistan, India, Japan and Thailand — yielded hundreds of works that not only stand on their own pictorial feet but also seeded visual ideas that would return in his later paintings.
Ghekiere’s work was exhibited widely across Belgium. He participated in important group shows and was featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent (BE) and galleries such as Kristof De Clercq gallery (Ghent, BE) and De Garage (Mechelen, BE). His posthumous exhibitions — including retrospectives and presentations of his works on paper — continue to reveal the depth and breadth of his artistic enquiry.
Beyond his studio practice, Ghekiere contributed to the artistic community as a teacher, notably at the Karel de Grote Hogeschool in Antwerp (BE). He lived and worked in a converted barge school in Klein Willebroek, where he cultivated a rich creative life.
Today, Joris Ghekiere’s legacy lives on through the continued exhibition and study of his work, which remains compelling for its expressive range, technical finesse, and capacity to reveal the unexpected in the everyday image. His artistic estate is managed by the Joris Ghekiere Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving, researching, and promoting his oeuvre for future generations.