Gideon Kiefer - The Fragile Excavation

Gideon Kiefer (Neerpelt, 1970, works and lives in Sint-Martens-Latem) presents his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Over the past years, he has exhibited in numerous international solo and group shows in galleries, art fairs, and institutional venues. His work is part of institutional collections such as Museum Dr. Guislain (B), Bank Delen (B), the Metzler Collection (LU), the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (B), Museum Voorlinden (NL), and Collection Guerlain (FR). Recently, he has been nominated for Le Prix de dessin de la Fondation d’Art Contemporain Daniel et Florence Guerlain 2025. The laureate will be announced in March 2025.

In The Fragile Excavation, Gideon Kiefer archaeologically excavates a childhood memory. The underground shelter of his neighbor, where they spent much of their youth, is brought to light. The sense of comfort and the mystique of their hidden clubhouse play a central role in these works.

Opening: Sat. 1st of February 15.00 - 19.00
Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent - BE
1 February - 9 March 2025

more info: desk@barbegallery.be

Exhibition text by Claire Leblanc (Director and conservator of Museum of Ixelles, Brussels BE)

Click here for the pdf version in EN / NL / FR.

The Fragile Excavation - Gideon Kiefer

‘The Delicate Art of Memory in Gideon Kiefer’s Work’

The images created by Gideon Kiefer are deeply disquieting… They strike us as much through their enigmatic nature and strangeness as through their familiar realism and captivating artistic virtuosity. As a whole, like a series, they first grip us with their powerful mimicry before inviting us into the possibility of a narrative flow. A wasteland, the edge of a forest, a strange construction, an embankment, a cavity… Without hesitation, Gideon places the viewer before seemingly open, neutral scenes, at the heart of which fascinating stories and a continuous narrative could unfold. Yet, Gideon deliberately chooses a kind of Kafkaesque “nothingness,” leaving the spectator confronted with undefined spaces, suspended time, and contextual incongruities. Jubilant freedom or anxiety-inducing uncertainty? It is up to the observer to either surrender to the fluidity of this dilemma and indeterminacy or to activate a more speculative mechanism of decoding.
For Gideon presents a body of work with a strong indexical nature. Through the subtle interplay of titles, annotations, and numbering, interpretative keys seem to be offered: a date, GPS coordinates, a phrase, a quotation… Yet, these are as much potential clues as they are deliberate misdirections. They ultimately lead to no reliable or definitive interpretation, no revelation. Like Alice in a chimerical labyrinth, the viewer embarks on an adventure as uncertain as it is fascinating: the paths explored turn into dead ends rich with visual and conceptual depth. 

It is undoubtedly within these meanderings that Gideon Kiefer’s work draws its meaning, its strength, and its coherence. Could these apparent wanderings not be the most fitting expression, the most resonant reflection of what lies at the heart of Gideon’s practice—namely, the question of memory?

This exhibition offers precisely such an exploration into the realm of personal memory. The Fragile Excavation is nothing less than the crystallization—through powerfully magnetic and mysterious works—of mental images that reveal a transitional process between past and present, between the world of childhood and the adult world. At the intersection of these extreme polarities, memory functions both as a point of convergence and a site of extreme tension—between unconscious and conscious thought, past and present—playing a pivotal role in the unresolved equation of the intricate relationship between dream and reality. Emerging from this delicate, fragile paradigm, Gideon Kiefer’s work manifests as a mnemonic trace, a construction signifying the inextricable nature of absence and the ephemeral. While each painting, in its singularity, assumes a unique memory (an atmosphere, a sensation, an event, a place…), their serial nature gives Gideon’s work a particular density: it becomes the foundation of a body of work that constitutes the artist’s Memoirs. Yet, from this meticulous excavation of the past, memories emerge alongside possibilities—those yet to be imagined and constructed.

The work—and the exhibition—offered by Gideon Kiefer is thus both a recomposed reflection of lived experience and an invitation, an opening towards what could have been lived and what might still be. Between remembrance and utopia, between melancholy and hope, Gideon creates a work that mirrors our own paradoxes, our own aspirations.

(Translation of the original French text)

Claire Leblanc - 19 January 2025