Illustrator and painter Jean-Philippe Delhomme has documented and satirised modern life for the last three decades in a career spanning the worlds of fashion, advertising, publishing, and contemporary art.
Read MoreJean-Philippe Delhomme was born in 1959 in Nanterre, France. He attended the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1985.
He lives and works in both Paris and Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. Many of his paintings reflect the interiors of and views from these studios.
Delhomme began his career in the late 1980s as an illustrator and painter. His satirical drawings are a testament to his penchant for keen observation, deftly capturing the absurdity of modern life.
He is well known as a fashion illustrator with his work being featured in both British and French Vogue, Libération, and Madame Figaro. Delhomme notably illustrated Glenn O'Brien's column 'The Style Guy' in GQ for over a decade. His advertising campaign for the luxury department store Barneys is particularly famous, featuring fashion illustrations paired with witty one-liners, as opposed to photographs.
Other illustrations have featured in Wallpaper, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Interview, and many more renowned publications. He has also illustrated and written numerous fashion, design, and lifestyle books including New York Travel Book for Louis Vuitton (2013), A Paris Journal (2016), and The Unknown Hipster Diaries (2013).
One of his most notable collaborations was with the Musee d'Orsay in 2020, as the museum's first Instagram artist-in-residence. He posted weekly illustrations on the museum's account, imagining what the collection's artists may have posted on social media through comical drawings and captions, inspired by his 2019 book Artists' Instagrams. These commissioned artworks epitomise Delhomme's skill for pairing humorous writing with charmingly rendered images.
Although he has spent much of his career applying his artistry to fashion and advertising, Delhomme is also an established painter, and has focussed on developing his work in the fine arts in his later career. His paintings range from portraiture, domestic interiors, still lifes, and landscapes traversing Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Paris, and Greece.
His depictions of contemporary life can be found anywhere from glossy magazine pages to gallery walls, and even to the interiors of legendary locales. He completed murals for the famed Paris club Chez Castel in 2014, and for the Hong Kong private members' club Carlyle & Co. in 2021.
Delhomme's paintings transfer the loose, colourful style of his illustrations to a larger scale. His expressive brushstrokes convey a variety of daily moments, as if documenting his life and the lives of those around him. His paintings take a more serious approach than his comically captioned drawings, which are often aimed at skewering society, finding inspiration in more traditional compositions to render portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. He has noted David Hockney andAlex Katz as especially important inspirations for his practice.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include: Los Angeles Language, Perrotin, Paris (2020); Jean-Philippe Delhomme, la SIRA, Asnieres-sur-Seine (2020); and Die Sache mit der Literatur, Institut Francais, Berlin (2017).
Group exhibitions include: Jean-Philippe Delhomme / Maylis de Kerangal : Légendes des réserves, Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2021); Les apparences – 50 peintres contemporains de la scène française, Centre d'Art À Cent Mètres du Centre du Monde, Perpignan (2021); and Man in Progress, Museo de Traje, Madrid (2014).
Jean-Philippe Delhomme's website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Articles on Jean-Philippe Delhomme have been published in various publications, including Interview, The Telegraph, and Art in America.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
