In the coming years, M HKA will dedicate a series of exhibitions to key figures of experimental art in the second half of the twentieth century, all of them also important presences in Antwerp in the 1960s and ’70s. We begin with the French poet, playwright, artist and thinker Robert Filliou (1926–1987). This autumn, we mount the first comprehensive survey of his visual oeuvre in Belgium, with more than 100 original works and multiples from public and private collections across Europe.

More radical, more fundamentally provocative, but also subtler and gentler than most of his contemporaries and peers, Filliou should be a household name for a large audience. With this exhibition we want to show today’s and tomorrow’s viewers that Filliou is not just one of the most influential artists of the recent past. He is a voice for our time, speaking of the political and poetic economy, of curiosity and research as more than ‘a privilege for those who already know’, of conviviality and play but also of loneliness as a productive and even desirable state.

Filliou is often associated with Fluxus but never ‘belonged’ to this or any other movement or group, although he worked closely with friends such as the artists Daniel Spoerri and Dieter Roth, the composer and artist George Brecht, the poet Emmett Williams or the architect and artist Joachim Pfeufer.

Together with his collaborators – first among them his wife Marianne Staffeldt Filliou – he coined many concepts and immediately enacted them in his work, among them the Eternal Network (of like-minded people all over the world); the Genial Republic (whose territory can be claimed by anyone at any time);the Principle of Equivalence (a direct attack on the primacy of aesthetic judgment in Western culture: “It doesn’t matter if something is well made, badly made or not made at all”); Teaching and Learning as Performance Arts (the title of a book from 1970) and, perhaps most importantly, Permanent Creation.