Mathieu Mercier

Born 1970 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France

Lives and works in Paris and Valencia.

Mathieu Mercier’s artistic output moves back and forth in a masterly manner between the categories of art and everyday culture. Situated within the dynamic field of architecture, design, and the visual arts, it reflects upon the fundamental ideas of Western culture in the twentieth century, especially the concept of Modernism.

Breaking boundaries between categories, he refers back to the avant-garde, to heroes such as Marcel Duchamp or Piet Mondrian, motivated by a simple visual language and above all by a desire for “Art Total”. Thus, he establishes connections with their gestures and pictorial inventions by means of deliberate displacements of apparently ordinary objects from the contemporary world. In a permanent exchange between high and low Mercier enigmatically poses the question as to the status of objects oscillating between functionality and artistic freedom from practical utilization when, for example, he takes pipes intended for construction purposes and converts them into benches, or transforms sporting equipment into monstrous light fixtures.

His works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and have been exhibited in leading museums around the world since the late 1990s. Mathieu Mercier received outstanding recognition in 2003 with the presentation of the renowned Prix Marcel Duchamp, and in 2007 – at the age of 37 – with a large retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.