On Tuesday October 19th, PIASA is organising a Modern and Contemporary Art auction. Featuring 86 lots, this sale is largely centred on pictorial works from the second half of the 20th century.
PIASA is organising an auction of Modern and Contemporary Art on Tuesday 19 October. Comprising 86 lots, this auction will focus largely on pictorial works from the second half of the 20th century.
A leading figure of his generation in the field of painting, engraving and sculpture, Gérard Garouste, who was born in Paris in 1946 and lives and works between Paris and Normandy, occupies a unique place in the international art world.
Gérard Garouste studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris from 1965 to 1972 in the studio of the abstract painter Gustave Singuier, where he discovered the work of Marcel Duchamp and Conceptual Art.
At the end of the 1970s, after an exhibition of Jean Dubuffet and works of art brut, he explored figurative and surrealist painting. In 1971, he entered classicism and was one of the initiators of post-modernism.
He is fascinated by the origins of Western culture. He studied biblical, mythological and literary texts. He explores the notion of myth, unconsciousness and sacredness. One can find a bit of El Greco and Tintoretto in his paintings.
"I want to take the best of the past, the techniques, the tools, the painting and the best of the present: being unique, iconoclastic, but not in anarchy". The 1980s correspond to a period of full pictorial blossoming, as shown by his early works Atropos, Thanatos and Mirror (1979-80). Garouste reveals his talents as a true figurative painter through a predominant theme in his paintings of this period: Mythology, which for the artist is "both a support and an alibi that allegorically addresses the question of the painter's mission, a messenger between the past and the future, a blind and clairvoyant guide, a double figure, divided between reason and madness, order and excess.
Atropos, Thanatos et miroir, (diptych) from 1979-1980, highlights two characters from Greek mythology: Atropos, daughter of Zeus, and Thanatos, personification of death. "We see that beyond the iconography, the artist seeks to express a filiation with Antiquity and Greek mythology. He tries to rewrite history, to teach the viewer to see the founding myths of his culture from another perspective than the one transmitted to him by school and religious teaching or academic culture.
Artist of international renown, his work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad, notably at the Galerie Durand Dessert, Paris, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York in 1982, at the Fondation Cartier, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1988, at the Villa Médicis in Rome in 2009, and at the Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris.
Gérard Garouste (born in 1946)
Atropos, Thanatos et miroir, 1979-80
Estimate: 30 000 / 50 000 €
