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2000
Bertrand Lavier
Mixed media
180 x 140 cm
Acrylic on mirror
© Adagp, Paris, 2002
© Adagp, Paris, 2002
During the 1970s, Bertrand Lavier created photographic works, and later repainted objects in view of creating a painting. Examples include a piano, a window, a refrigerator, and a mirror, covered in a thick layer of paint of the same colour as the original object. Lavier’s mirror is covered with a thick coat of metallic paint. The surface becomes opaque with a few light reflections. The mirror is hence of no practical use but gives the spectator the opportunity to experience something unusual: he will not find his own image but a metaphor of what identity is, shallow and hazy.
This work was loaned
to the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum for the “Perspectives” exhibition from 25 April to 25 May 2014.
This work was loaned
to the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum for the “Perspectives” exhibition from 25 April to 25 May 2014.
Bertrand Lavier
France
Born in 1949
Born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, France
A self-taught artist with a training in horticulture, Bertrand Lavier has made converting everyday objects into works of art the focus of his painterly activity. An overt admirer of Marcel Duchamp’s provocative transgressions and Raymond Hains’s tongue-in-cheek, conceptual offerings, he is fascinated by the relationship between art and reality, and transforms mass-produced or ready-made objects, such as a refrigerator placed on a safe or an anvil on a chest of drawers, into “sculptures on
a pedestal”.
Thus elevating ready-mades to the rank of an artistic discipline comparable to painting and sculpture, he has exhibited, in turn, Giuletta, a wrecked Alfa Romeo, Dolly, a deflated hot-air balloon, and Ifava IV, a group of neon tubes. He has also played the role of a Hollywood artist with his Walt Disney Productions, sculptures inspired by the setting of a Mickey Mouse comic strip: a magical reinterpretation of a reinvented reality
A self-taught artist with a training in horticulture, Bertrand Lavier has made converting everyday objects into works of art the focus of his painterly activity. An overt admirer of Marcel Duchamp’s provocative transgressions and Raymond Hains’s tongue-in-cheek, conceptual offerings, he is fascinated by the relationship between art and reality, and transforms mass-produced or ready-made objects, such as a refrigerator placed on a safe or an anvil on a chest of drawers, into “sculptures on
a pedestal”.
Thus elevating ready-mades to the rank of an artistic discipline comparable to painting and sculpture, he has exhibited, in turn, Giuletta, a wrecked Alfa Romeo, Dolly, a deflated hot-air balloon, and Ifava IV, a group of neon tubes. He has also played the role of a Hollywood artist with his Walt Disney Productions, sculptures inspired by the setting of a Mickey Mouse comic strip: a magical reinterpretation of a reinvented reality
Artwork of
Bertrand Lavier
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