Geert Goiris. «Winter Dream»

01 March 2025 → 10 May 2025

Although Geert Goiris (Bornem, Belgium, 1971) lives and works in Antwerp, he often travels the world in search of unusual places which he interprets in enigmatic images.

His photos often denote a fundamental tension between man and nature. They document unusual encounters with subjects that seem clearly out of place and show strange and abandoned urban environments with a touch of nostalgia, loneliness and drama or utopian landscapes with traces of human presence.

By regularly adopting the point of view of the outsider, Goiris creates a tangible distance between photographer and subject. While playing with form, abstraction, light and depth, all sense of time and space fades away using prolonged photographic exposure to reflect the unnaturalness of the situations he encounters; a style the artist himself describes as ‘traumatic realism’.

All of this was a consequence of his desire to find a contemporary expression of the representation of ‘the last days’ or the end of time, a world without people.

Geert Goiris (Bornem, Belgium, 1971) 

In his extensive work, Goiris addresses the possible loss of the world as we know it, with an approach that does not exclude aspects of beauty. On the contrary, in his travels, Goiris captures deserted landscapes, strange rock formations, gnarled trees and mysterious artefacts, giving them a fascinating physical presence. The objects and landscapes in his photographs appear as melancholic bearers of secrets, impossible to classify in terms of time or space. His images are intentionally detached from a specific period, giving the feeling that we could be simultaneously contemplating the past and the future.

He has participated in solo exhibitions at FOAM, Amsterdam; VOX, Montreal; Barrage de Mauvoisin, Le Châble; Museum M, Leuven; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; and Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine.

His work has also been shown in several group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Metz; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Bozar, Brussels; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; MHKA, Antwerp; Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, Düsseldorf; S.M.A.K, Ghent; Manifesta 5, San Sebastian; and Platform Garanti, Istanbul.