PHILIPPE COGNÉE

For many years, Philippe Cognée has been tackling subjects often associated with the banality and ugliness of our civilisation–supermarkets, highways, impersonal architecture–magnifying them through his technique of wax paint, which, once melted and crushed, creates a striking and unique effect of blur. In a nod to video, digital technology and the hypervigilance of Google Earth, his paintings offer a deconstruction of the contemporary gaze. They explore the notion of ‘recognisable’, of memory and oblivion, in an existential questioning on the ‘exhaustion of images’.

Born in 1957, Philippe Cognée works in Nantes and Paris. A Villa Medici’s laureate in 1990 and nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2004, Philippe Cognée spent many years teaching at the Paris École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he trained a new generation of young figurative painters.

His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at Geneva’s MAMCO (2006), the Haute-Normandie Frac (2007), Musée de Grenoble (2013), Château de Chambord (2014), Fondation Fernet-Branca in Saint-Louis (2016) and Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (2020). It also features in a great many museum collections, such as at the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris as well as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne and Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, which has recently commissioned two large-scale landscapes.

For spring 2023, he has been invited for a major solo exhibition at the newly renovated musée Bourdelle followed by a show at the Musée de L’Orangerie, both in Paris. The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans will be holding a solo exhibition of his work from May to October 2023.