Curtiz (Kris De Meester) – Other People’s Life

Kris Meester
Sep 25, 2024
2 min read

Updated: Aug 26

Velvet Room, Alpacastraat 29, 9000 Gent / Monday, Sept. 29 to Sunday, Oct. 5 / 14.00-18.00

From 29 September to 5 October 2025, Velvet Room in Ghent presents Other People’s Life, an exhibition by Belgian artist Curtiz (Kris De Meester). Known for his work with Polaroids and mixed media, De Meester here turns his gaze outward, appropriating American found family photographs and reimagining them into contemporary artworks that bridge memory, nostalgia, and the fragile passage of adolescence.

Found images, new stories

In Other People’s Life, De Meester uses snapshots once meant to capture private moments—birthday parties, vacations, awkward teenage poses—and gives them a second life as layered, tactile compositions. By combining photography with painting and mixed media, he blurs the line between past and present, intimacy and distance, reality and fiction.

The result is not mere nostalgia but a coming-of-age narrative, reframed through the lens of contemporary art. Each piece becomes both a personal relic and a universal reflection on memory, identity, and the invisible threads that tie us to one another’s histories.

Nostalgia as critique

De Meester’s reworking of anonymous images raises questions about ownership, memory, and cultural mythology. By transplanting these American family photos into a gallery context, he highlights their archetypal quality: the smiling faces, the awkward poses, the rituals of belonging. Yet the added layers of paint, marks, and textures invite viewers to consider what lies beneath these staged moments—the tension between appearance and truth, innocence and experience, memory and erasure.

About the artist

Kris De Meester has long been fascinated by portraiture, identity, and the power of images to shape memory. Under the artist name Curtiz, he pushes the boundaries of photography through mixed media interventions, often using Polaroids as a starting point. His work has been shown internationally and consistently engages with themes of human vulnerability, intimacy, and the complexity of memory.