Exhibition “Feline Fiction” now showing at Gastfeld Gallery Bremen
Happy to announce my solo exhibition “Feline Fiction” hosted by Gastfeld Gallery in Bremen, Germany, co-curated by me and gallery curator Marvin Marckwardt. The photographs will be on display from July 1st through October 29th 2022.
The photo series "Feline Fiction", put together for this exhibition, alternates surrealistic dream images and elements of desirefulness with the feline power and cuteness of cats encountered while traveling around Europe. The series does not follow a classic linear storyline, but emerges as a kittenish collage sparkling with vivid colors, female protagonists and feline curiosity, not constrained by the boundaries of the clearly present urban geometry in the photos.
Full press release:
Jeffrey De Keyser was born in 1984 in Kortrijk, a Belgian city in the Flemish province of West Flanders. He grew up in a village called Marke just outside of Kortrijk. He is currently living in Ghent and started working as a social science teacher in Brussels after graduating with a master’s degree in political science from Ghent University.
Besides teaching, his biggest passions are travel (both abroad and inside the country) and photography, preferably at the same time. These passions reflect his interest in exploring society and the human mind.
De Keyser has always been interested in the power of visual language as a means of communication and storytelling, but it was only in 2014 that he began to take photography more seriously when he discovered the street photography genre. And he is still in love with it today. According to Jeffrey, street photography opens up a whole new world of magical moments and untold stories. What started off as a leisure-time activity became a means of self-expression and discovery for him, which fundamentally changed his perception of reality.
As a street photographer, De Keyser likes to focus on the surreal and absurd condition of human existence. He sees photography as a mirror of the subconscious, as an existential inquiry into perception, as a way of questioning the Camusian conflict between the human tendency to seek meaning and purpose in life and the human inability to find any. His aim as a photographer is to portray a slice of the human condition, a glimpse of the subconscious mind through a universal visual language. His photography is strongly inspired by the surrealist movement.
His work has been exhibited and curated internationally, including at the Brussels Street Photography Festival, the London Street Photography Festival, the Italian Street Photo Festival in Rome, Street Sans Frontières in Paris, and the Moment Street Photo Awards in Częstochowa, Poland. Features that have been published online include PhotoVogue, Life Framer and Eyeshot Magazine. In Belgium, he has exhibited and been awarded at the Fotonale in Bruges, the photo festival ‘Lens op de Mens’ in Pelt, as well as at shows curated by the visual arts platform Breedbeeld. His first solo exhibition ‘Catharsis’ - in collaboration with Fotografiecircuit Vlaanderen - travelled across 18 cultural centres across Flanders, Belgium between June 2019 and April 2022.
The photo series ‘Feline Fiction’, put together for this exhibition, echoes the visual language of ‘Catharsis’. It can be considered as an associative stream of images, which alternates surrealistic dream images and elements of desirefulness with the feline power and cuteness of cats encountered while traveling around Europe. The series does not follow a classic linear storyline, but emerges as a kittenish collage sparkling with vivid colors, female protagonists and feline curiosity, not constrained by the boundaries of the clearly present urban geometry in the photos.
Some of De Keyser’s earlier work was shown in different ‘World Street Photography’ group exhibitions at the Gudberg Nerger Gallery in Hamburg between 2016 and 2018. ‘Feline Fiction’ at the Gastfeld Gallery in Bremen, however, is the artist's first solo exhibition in Germany. This exhibition will run from July 1st until October 29th 2022.
Articles about my exhibition published in the Bremen daily newspaper Weser-Kurier:
Some photos from the exhibition by gallery curator Marvin Marckwardt: