Jef Meyer (1989)

Born in Antwerp in 1989, Jef Meyer is an artist with a predilection for an unusual material: concrete. Having grown up amidst the brutalist skyscrapers of northern Antwerp, he was drawn first to architecture. Art soon won out however, and he changed tack, enrolling in the IN SITU course held at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts. In 2013 he won a prestigious assignment: to build a temporary pavilion in the gardens of the academy, which he constructed with reclaimed wood and grass. An awareness of space remains integral to his practice; often unframed, his often large-scale concrete works interact with their environment, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture.

His growing body of work results from his experiments with water, cement sand and pigments. There is an element of unpredictability in the use of concrete, and everything that occurs organically during the process, including irregularities and cracks, becomes integral to the finished piece. Despite the ‘polished’ appearance of some pieces, no post-processing is involved, and any patina is simply the result of chemical reactions that occur within the substance of the work. With echoes of brutalist and minimalist art, Jef Meyer’s work has already attracted the attention of both collectors and the press in Belgium, where his work has notably been exhibited at the Calewaert en Van Langendonck Gallery in Antwerp.