Vic Gentils

Vic (Victor) Gentils (born April 19, 1919 in Ilfracombe , Devon , United Kingdom , † February 27, 1997 in Aalst , Belgium ) was a Belgian sculptor and painter.

life and work

Vic Gentils was born in England to a French father and a Flemish mother . He studied art with a focus on painting from 1940 to 1947 at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp . In the 1950s, influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso , he began to work as a sculptor. Gentils was a co-founder of the artist group " Hessenhuis G 58 " (named after a historic building in Antwerp, the Hessenhuis - " Hessenhaus ").

In the 1960s, Gentils created revolutionary abstract objects. Gentils is particularly known for these three-dimensional, sometimes relief-like sculptures , assemblages and objects, which consisted of mutilated pieces of furniture, pianos and frames that were torn out of their context by him and shaped into new sculptures. From 1965 he also made fully plastic figures and rediscovered the human body as the subject of his sculpting in the 1970s. Vic Gentils is one of the most important representatives of the Belgian “ Nouveau Réalisme ”.

In 1964, his works were shown in the sculpture department at documenta III in Kassel . In the same year he was also a participant in the Venice Biennale , and in 1967 he took part in the São Paulo Biennale .

Vic Gentils is buried on the Schoonselhof in Antwerp.

Honors

• Officer of the Order of the Leopold
• Knight of the Belgian Order of the Crown

Literature and Sources

• documenta III. International exhibition ; Catalog: Volume 1: Painting and Sculpture; Volume 2: Hand Drawings; Volume 3: Industrial Design, Graphics; Kassel / Cologne 1964
• Vic Gentils. Lannoo, Tielt 1994, ISBN 90-209-2505-9 . (Retrospective exhibition at the Cultureel Centrum 't Elzenveld, Antwerp 1994).

Web links

• Examples of his work
• Examples of his work
• Biography in Dutch (PDF file; 32 kB)
• His tomb on the Schoonselhof
• Materials by and about Vic Gentils in the documenta archive