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Siedlung Halen (5) (la place du village) / Architectes: Atelier 5 / construction : 1961 (projet 1955) / Bern, Suisse

2013

Yves Bélorgey

Painting

240 x 240 cm

Yves Bélorgey scoured the world in search of “urbansuburb modernist buildings” as the subjects for his collection of large-scale paintings.His work aims to reproduce both the ruins of modernism - an age ofarchitectural utopia for social housing - and the value of pictorial traditions.Bélorgey’s tableaus have a set format (240 x 240 cm) and their titles documentthe building’s location and the name of its architect, a social, political orarchitectural failure, as well as the collapse of artistic modernism and painting.With the renovation of urban social housing from the 1970s, Bélorgey too begana period of “reparation” by fabricating building images. In doing so, he was tochampion a form of painting that makes proud use of traditional means, givingit an anthropological dimension that is directly in touch with the reality ofour surroundings, with the present, and with the history of art.

Yves Bélorgey

France

Born in 1960

Born in Sens, France in 1960.
Lives and works in Montreuil, France.

After graduating in law and art history, Yves Bélorgey turned to painting as a career. Intrigued by the landscapes around him and the potential of painting to represent those landscapes, it was during a stay in Germany in 1986 and again in 1991 that his decision to devote his canvasses entirely to housing blocks first emerged. On his return to France, he focused his work on the urban buildings on the outskirts of Paris built between the 1950s and the 1970s. His inspiration and subject matter, his paintings and their autobiographical undertones are intended to capture the multifaceted reality of those buildings. As well as several canvasses of the Mirail project in Toulouse, Yves Bélorgey’s work includes a large number of paintings and drawings covering the projects of urban architect Jean Renaudie, in Yvry-sur-Seine and Givors. The artist’s work also covers similar themes in Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.