Mathieu Mercier

Lamps, furniture, bicycles, letter presses, museum pedestals: 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.

Again and again, he refers back to the artistic avant-garde, to heroes such as Marcel Duchamp or Piet Mondrian, and 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.

Mathieu Mercier was born in 1970 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France and lives and works in Paris. 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.

His work is represented in numerous international institutions, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Frac Alsace, Sélestat; Frac Ile-de-France, Paris; Frac Lorraine, Metz; Frac Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; Musééé d’Art Moderne de Strasbourg; Muséee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunstmuseum Kiel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; or QAGOMA, Queensland.

photo © Bojana Tatarska