Pierre Bismuth

Pierre Bismuth was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris in 1963. He graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and studied with the artist Georg Baselitz in Berlin in the 1980s. On his return to Paris, he shared a studio with artists Xavier Veilhan and Pierre Huyghe. Since the 1990s, he has lived and worked intermittently in Brussels, after several years in London and spending a few seasons in New York.

His versatile work crosses different fields of intervention, his humorous and critical gestures question the status of the work of art, as well as ways of apprehending and understanding the world. His first works, at the end of the 1980s, revolve around linguistic games. He regularly appropriates and subverts images from everyday objects, film excerpts, linguistic, or cultural references, questioning the usual perception of what surrounds us. Bismuth seeks to destroy the idea of a passive audience: in his installations, external protagonists participate in the very elaboration of the project or it is the spectators who activate the work. He creates subtle, playful and provocative experiences - playing with the colours of the painting on the walls of the exhibition space (From Red to Nothing and From Green to Something Else); confusing actors, passers-by and tourists (Quelques comédiens au milieu de quelques acteurs, 1997-1999); tracing the gesture of an actor's hand during a plan, resulting in an abstract drawing, later printed on top of the photogram of the plan (Following the Right Hand of..., 2009).

His work is regularly exhibited, with individual exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna); MAMCO (Geneva); The Showroom (London); Villa Arson (Nice); CAC Vilnius (Lithuania); Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels); Witte de With (Rotterdam); Kunsthalle Basel or Santa Monica Museum of Art. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including The New Museum (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris and Metz), The San Diego Museum of Art, M HKA (Antwerp), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea de Santiago de Compostela, ICA Institute of Contemporary Art (London), SESC São Paulo, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (Paris).

CB, janeiro 2021