30 january 2026, Flor Linckens
Paul Gees: tension as a working principle
Until 28 February, Galerie van den Berge presents an online exhibition on GalleryViewer featuring a selection of works by the Belgian artist Paul Gees. This online-only presentation brings together works from the early 1990s to the present, comprising clear works in different media, ranging from sculptures to works on paper.
Paul Gees was born in Aalst in 1949 and trained as an interior architect at Sint-Lukas Brussels. Since the 1970s, his practice has developed at the intersection of sculpture, space and architecture. His early work emerged in the context of performance, installation and interventions in his immediate surroundings. In this period, he drew inspiration from Fluxus, Arte Povera and Minimal Art, particularly following a visit to documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. From the 1980s onwards, his focus shifted towards sculptures and other spatial objects, which result from minimal and carefully planned interventions. Alongside his artistic practice, Gees was active for many years as a lecturer at Sint-Lukas.
His practice is characterised by self-imposed constraints, a consistent use of materials and a pronounced attention to construction and proportion. Gees investigates a recurring point of departure: tension. Not as a metaphor, but as a concrete, physical reality. For his three-dimensional works, he uses materials such as ash wood, plywood, HPL board, stone and steel. He approaches these materials through their structural and physical properties. Nature and culture are occasionally in opposition here. In his predominantly horizontal and vertical structures, Gees plays with pressure, weight, rhythm, scale, balance and gravity, as well as with the contrast between support and resistance. He makes these tensions visible in a way and charges his works with energy. Within this framework, wood often functions as a living, flexible and dynamic component, while stone and steel introduce weight and a rigid form of resistance.
Architecture plays a significant role in his artistic practice, not so much as a formal language but rather as a conceptual model, as a way of approaching the world around him. Gees considers architecture a human interpretation of elements and matter, as a human ordering of forces and relationships that also occur in nature. A certain clarity and sense of self-evidence are embedded within that framework.
Gees’s work has been included in the collections of M HKA, S.M.A.K. Ghent, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the National Bank of Belgium, KBC Bank, AZ Alma Hospital and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. In addition, several of his works can be found in public space across Belgium. He has exhibited his work at institutions including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, M HKA and Z33. His work was also shown in a store of the fashion house Celine in Beijing. In 2019, he published the 520-page book ‘Paul Gees – tension, balance, risk, stability’, in which he further explores his thinking and working process.
