Gerard Petrus Fieret

LE BAL is presenting a monographic exhibition devoted to Dutch artist, poet and photographer Gerard P. Fieret (1924-2009), the first to take place outside Holland. His output included some of the strangest and most subversive works produced in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Fieret was self-taught and, between 1965, the year he acquired his first camera (a Praktiflex) and the end of the 1970s, he was an obsessional and insatiable photographer, taking pictures of anything and everything: women, legs, children, shop windows, street scenes, himself, more women – models, students, young mothers, dancers, strangers, as well as breasts, buttocks, legs, necks and other body parts.

Through his photographs, as through unsilvered mirrors, he achieved the paradox of revealing himself and asserting his presence in the world by hiding behind a camera.

He always took black and white photos. Blacks that were thick, sometimes blurred, but always luminous. They were often enlarged to his favourite 60 x 80 cm format, an unusual size for the time. Fieret was transgressive, unconventional and yet timeless; he would disfigure the image and distort reality in search of “something supernatural, a sense of the eternal”. The BAL exhibition presents 200 contemporary prints, rescued from extreme production conditions and a nomad existence between studios and shelters. They were obtained using chemicals and out-of-date photographic paper – sometimes dried and burnt with a candle, deliberately exposed to the wear and tear of everyday life in the form of dust, footprints, scratches, mouse droppings and pigeon shit. Most of them are compulsively signed and stamped by their author.

They bear the marks of constant abuse, while at the same time being the ultimate proof of a vanished fervency. 

To go along with the exhibition, LE BAL and Xavier Barral Éditions co-publish the book Gerard Petrus Fieret.