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

2013

YVES BELORGEY

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 BELORGEY

France

Born in 1960

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

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