Johan Gelper (°1980, Kapellen)
Lives and works in Ghent, BE
Johan Gelper is a Belgian visual artist who works with a diverse range of materials and techniques, including installation, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking.
His practice connects the immaterial with the physical world by reconfiguring familiar objects and questioning their social value. By transforming everyday objects whose meaning is deeply embedded in our everyday experience, he invites us to look at them with new eyes.
His installations, often described as “demountable spatial drawings,” reveal an additional dimension through the transformation of materials.
Gelper’s sculptures often explore the relationship between the language of sculpture and botany. Their open, transparent forms depend on their surroundings, reflecting nature’s adaptive processes. Everyday objects are rearranged into dynamic structures that fuse natural, industrial, and geometric elements.
Drawing is an integral part of his practice, serving both as a way of thinking and a means of giving form to ideas. His drawings— often combining technical and botanical elements — function as autonomous works that explore the boundary between intuitive mark-making and constructed form.
