LAVIER, BERTRAND
1949 Châtillon-sur-Seine

Title: "Chambord".
Date: 1992.
Technique: Acrylic on mirror, framed.
Measurement: 85 x 73 x 8cm.
Notation: Titled, signed and dated verso upper centre: "Chambord" Bertrandlavier 1992. Additionally dedicated to Kasper König.


Provenance:
- Kasper König Collection, Berlin (directly from the artist)

Art about kissing mouths and fridges
Influenced by his studies as a landscape gardener and the conceptual art of the 1960s, Bertrand Lavier started out as a self-taught artist. He is one of the most influential French artists of the present day. His work is characterised by a humorous style and the combination of everyday objects with motifs from Pop Art and art history. His 'objets peints', in which he usually paints everyday objects with acrylic paint, and his 'objets superposés', ready-mades based on the stacking of everyday objects, have brought him international attention. An example of this is the work 'La Bocca' from 2005, presented in his solo exhibition 'Since 1969' at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Here, Lavier places Salvador Dalì's iconic lip sofa on a refrigerator and contrasts the curved contours of the fiery red mouth with the clear edges of the cold refrigerator. Using artistic tricks such as assemblage or the staging of everyday objects in the white cube, he questions the original intention of the object and removes it from its banal, commercial context. In doing so, he tests the boundaries of artistic and social categories. Not to be neglected are his neon tube works, which he conceives in strong dialogue with and reference to the formal language of Frank Stella.

Chambord
'Chambord' can be counted among the "Miroirs" series of works, in which Lavier increasingly deals with mirrors that are painted with a colourless gel. He often refers to aristocratic residences or noble families in his titles. Chambord Castle, for example, is one of the most representative and innovative aristocratic buildings in France. With the pastose application of colour of the 'objets peints', often associated in literature with Van Gogh, which blurs the boundaries between three-dimensional object and flat painting, 'Chambord' questions the function of the canvas as a classic painting surface. Lavier pursues a cultural anthropological approach and reflects on the elasticity of reality and its forms of appearance. 'A mirror 'manifests what you think you see'', says Lavier. In addition to raising the question of genre, painting or object, the distortion of the mirror image, of which a vague silhouette remains, also provokes 'Chambord' to question its own identity, a certainty that the recipient has actually assumed to be the most solid of his being.