Victor ‘Vic’ Gentils was born in the United Kingdom. His Franco-Flemish parents had sought temporary refuge in the country during the First World War. After the conflict, the family moved to Antwerp, where Vic studied painting at KASK and HISK. In 1943, he made his debut with landscape paintings. Three years later, he had his first solo exhibition at the Royal Art Circle in Antwerp. Like many Flemish artists at the time, Gentils was an expressionist painter. He later strove to distinguish himself stylistically through informal, neo-Surrealist and abstract elements. Inspired by the African art exhibited at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1956, Gentils – alongside many of his contemporaries – experimented with unconventional materials such as papier-mâché, Plexiglas and fused gramophone records. It was his first step away from the flat pictorial plane to a more spatial art. Through constructions with wooden slats, frames, reliefs and assemblages of recuperated materials, this evolution culminated in three-dimensional sculptures. Homage to [Constant] Permeke (1964) is Gentils’ first pure sculpture.
In 1958, Gentils, along with Paul Van Hoeydonck and Walter Leblanc, amongst others, ushered the artist group G58 into the world. As people flocked to Brussels that year for the World Exhibition, the members of the group showed their work at Antwerp’s Hessenhuis. Gentils left the group as early as 1960 and founded the New Flemish School together with Guy Vandenbranden, Guy Mees and Jef Verheyen, amongst other artists. In their manifesto, they decried Belgian painting and declared their desire to connect the universal with the Flemish tradition. Gentils met Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana in Milan in 1959. Fontana also introduced relief and depth to his painting during this period. Gentils continued his experimentation with reliefs made from nails and charred wood, and started working with piano parts in 1961. He incorporated the keys in black and white, hammers, felt, pedals and other components into his reliefs.
His first retrospective was De pianos van Gentils [Gentils’ pianos] in 1962 (Schiedam, Netherlands). During this period, the artist managed to acquire a large stock of wooden millinery blocks and felt. He combined these with furniture fragments and parts of ships to create relief compositions. Gentils represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and also exhibited at Documenta III (Kassel, Germany). He won first prize for his work at the San Marino Biennale (1965) and signed a contract with Galerie Krugier in Geneva, Switzerland. Krugier encouraged him to create a work based on a chair, which led to a sculpture of a queen on a throne. It became the impetus for The Great Game of Chess (1966-67), a 32-piece group of black and white pieces, first shown at the São Paulo Biennale.
Gentils moved to Hingene in 1970 and worked on a boat-cum-studio on the River Scheldt. It was here that he made works such as Il Papa (1970), Monument Huysmans-Lenin (1970-71) and his famous portrait of Lode Craeybeckx (1972), Mayor of Antwerp and founder of the Middelheim Museum. In the 1960s and 70s, Gentils created more than 700 works. After a heart attack in 1972, the artist temporarily restricted himself to smaller works. He realised a monumental, mirrored relief for the Brussels metro station Thieffry in 1976. Afterwards, he returned to making bigger ensembles. Gentils repeatedly stressed that he saw himself as a painter. He selected from an array of materials on the basis of colour and texture, sometimes altering their appearance through charring or sandblasting, amongst other treatments.
Gentils was knighted in 1992. He died in 1997 and is buried in the Schoonselhof cemetery in Antwerp. He was a restless artist. In 1966, Gentils said, “I’m constantly in rebellion, also against myself.”
