Pierre Muckensturm
Born 1970 in Strasbourg (FR), lives and works in France
Represented by the Galerie La Ligne since 2021
Works by Pierre Muckensturm
He studied geography before specialising in regional planning at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg.
Pierre MUCKENSTURM's artistic career began in 1997 with a resolutely figurative approach. His first collectors included a num-ber of architects who introduced him to their art and design, and introduced him to a major work by Le Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut, as well as Le Modulor. It was after visiting Le Corbusier's studio in 2004 that he turned to abstraction, striving to redis-cover in his work the relevance and accuracy of the plastic response he had perceived at the time: the right relationship between emptiness and fullness, between lightness and heaviness.
In 2010, during an artistic residency at the Musée Boribana in Dakar, Africa imposed on him a new, infinitely flexible relationship with temporality. This discovery led him to pursue a lengthy research project aimed at a better understanding the possible coexistence between the curved line and the rigour of a geometric construction.
Shortly after his stay in Africa, following a rediscovery of the work of the artist Martin Barré, he allowed himself a radical simplifi-cation of his work, giving pride of place to residual spaces, voids, blanks, the unpainted or unrealized.
His recent research are conceptual and constructed based. They draw on pre-established principles and seek to bring out the fantasy of the curved line when it is introduced into rigorously geometric and orthogonal constructions.
He likes to say, not without irony:
"I have a pronounced taste for fantasy, with a tolerance of plus or minus two comma two degrees,"
The attempt to control a system essentially leads to its disruption. Pierre Muckensturm playfully address the serial declination of modules, deconstructing a system without appearing to touch it. Through accumulations and layers, they reveal tipping points
that break open the boundaries of meaning.
Muckensturm's repetitive and systematic use of structuring elements generates an incomprehensible choreography that uncovers the unreadable.
Sabine Arlitt - Art historian - Zürich
Pierre Muckensturm skilfully cultivates this dichotomy between orderly logic and rebellious spirit.
His thinking is elaborate, his inventiveness gushing, boundless and full of humour.
Pierre doesn't make art to be bored or to pompously lay down dogmas, still less to put off the amateur.
If he takes hold of rules, it is to implement them with jubilant obstinacy, twisting them, circumventing them, divert-ing them, scrolling them to a point of destructuring that proclaims their emptiness.
It is this game of the deregulated rule that interests Pierre Muckensturm and that he explores. A playful search, a mastered compulsion unfolding in a serial practice. It generates these choreographies of turned, turned over, aligned, misaligned squares swirling on the white of his canvases hung in monomials, in pairs, in threes or fours, in checkerboards... The uncertain and fragile fruits of diverted mathematical rigour. Squares that apologise for not being squares…
Luc Maechel - Art historien - Colmar
Public collections (Selection)
Espace d’Art contemporain André Malraux - Colmar, FR
Musée des Beaux-arts La Boverie - Liège, BE
Collection Gautier & Co - Paris. FR
Tama Art University Museum - Tokyo, JP
International Print Center New-York - New York, USA
Musée Boribana Dakar - Dakar, SN
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