
When Marc Desgrandchamps was commissioned by its publisher for the Louis Vuitton Travel Book collection, he chose Barcelona. He wandered throughout the city, absorbing its atmosphere, grasping its landscape and scenery, using his camera to capture some details. Then, once back in his studio, he used these memories, sometimes blending them in with his photographic elements, thereby realising a sensitive itinerary of Barcelona through 120 drawings, distributed by city sectors: Gotic, Eixample, Raval, Montjuic,..
After a first selection had been presented at the gallery in June, just after the lockdown, this second part of the exhibition will include about 30 unseen drawings.
Marc Desgrandchamps, born in 1960, studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Paris. In the 90s he breaks free from the opposition between figurative and abstract art characteristic of the great majority of XXth century pictorial narratives.
For although his work is figurative, the artist refuses to name it as such. His works are not nudes, not landscapes, nor still-life studies: they transcend categories. They play with the interpenetration of forms and subject, solely underscoring the ambiguity of time and space. Scenes play out against the depth of the painting, time is suspended and references to painting, photography and films run through his work.
Marc Desgrandchamps’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions notably at the Contemporary Art Museum of Strasbourg (2004), at the Contemporary Art Museum of Lyon (2004), at the KunstMuseum of Bonn (2005), as well as at the National Modern Art Museum (2006), at the G.Pompidou Center & Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris (2011), at the Fine Arts Museum of Caen (2017).
Marc Desgrandchamps (born in 1960) lives and works in Lyon (France). Marc Desgrandchamps, leading painter figure painter of the French art scene, plays with the notions of opacity, transparency and superimposition. If his painting is figurative, indeed we recognise bodies and landscapes, the perspective is often twisted, space is indefinite, and suddenly anomalies arise: bodies and objects are fragmented. His works references comes from many universes (art history, photography, cinema, literature and music), it raises the question of the medium’ specificities and experiences the limits of figuration. He paints, according to his own words, ‘a painting of doubt, doubt of the figure, doubt of presence, doubt even of painting’. Another recurrent motif in its artistic practice, the feminine figure, and especially the one of the bathers, occupies a central place. Marc Desgrandchamps has benefited from several major exhibitions, especially in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Strasbourg (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon (2004), the Kunstmuseum in Bonn (2005), the National Museum of Modern Art—Centre Georges Pompidou (2006), as well as an important retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris (2011). In addition, his work is present in French institutional collections (FRAC Ile-de-France - Le Plateau in Paris, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Étienne, Regional Museum of Contemporary Art Languedoc-Roussillon in Sérignan, Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg).




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