
Marc Desgrandchamps recently created three new lithographs for Lelong Editions on the presses of Atelier Michael Woolworth in Paris. The title of these lithographs, Latona, is discretely incorporated into each one of them. This is far from being a banal choice of name, as it evokes memories and popular and artistic culture; indeed, the same combination of sparse references that are often to be found in his pictorial compositions.
Latona is a jazz number recorded in 1965 by the organist Big John Patton and a particular favourite of the artist. On the sleeve of the album, Let’em roll, we see the silhouette of a woman, almost a shadow, in an exaggeratedly arched posture, and this image inevitably brings to mind the figures that regularly appear in his work. But the title also refers to the myth of Latona: a goddess persecuted by Juno, obliged to wander the world and hide between land and sea in order to give birth to Apollo and Diana. A myth of wandering that seems to be reflected in a number of the artist’s works.
In addition to the colour lithographs, the exhibition will present works in black and white, enhanced lithographs and new small gouaches.
Marc Desgrandchamps, born in 1960, is a French painter whose work has been in exhibited in museums in Germany and France: Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg, Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon, Saarland Museum in Sarrebruck, Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the MNAM Centre Georges Pompidou and the Musée d’art moderne, both in Paris.
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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