18 February 2016
A conversation between Catherine Millet and Bertrand Lavier
At the heart of the presentation is a new series of paintings that belong to one of Lavier’s most iconic bodies of work: Walt Disney Productions. The starting point for the project, which began in 1984, is to be found in a Walt Disney comic strip from 1977, in which Mickey and Minnie Mouse visit a modern art gallery. Here, they encounter an array of paintings and sculptures that ingeniously mimic genuine modern and contemporary art (the biomorphic sculptures in the story resemble the work of Jean Arp, for example). Fascinated by this, Lavier started to make life-size replicas of the Disney artworks. Hence his colourful, abstract canvases are directly inspired by the paintings that sprang from the cartoonist’s imagination but which, in their own humorous way, were undoubtedly based upon real works of art.