As part of the "Daniel Varenne II Collection" auction sell on Wednesday October 28th, 2020, the Modern and Contemporary Art department of PIASA is highlighting the work of the avant-garde French artist Benjamin Vautier, best known as Ben.
Living in Nice since the age of 14, Ben entered the history of art in 1956 when he decided to execute a banana as a new abstract form. The criteria that motivated his choice were those favoured by the creative ideology of the 20th century, novelty and the exaltation of the ego. However, Ben soon proved to be much more cynical in his questioning of the artistic phenomenon. Deeply marked by Duchamp, he decided in 1960 to bring the logic of the ready-made to its paroxysm and systematically signed what had never been ready-made: hens, holes, God... He paid him the greatest of tributes through his Boîte de Duchamp (1979).
Advocating the dissolution between art and life, Ben declares in a totally iconoclastic manner: "Everything is art". At a time when he frequented the artists of the New Realism, he was invited by Daniel Spoerri in 1962 to take part in the Misfits Fair in London: his participation consisted of living for fifteen days in the window of a gallery. Back in Nice, he launched an active propaganda operation for Fluxus to which he will always remain faithful. For Ben, Fluxus was a "state of mind" that would leave a deep imprint on his work from 1963 onwards, notably through the lasting influences of Georges Maciunas, John Cage and George Brecht.
Ben (Benjamin Vautier) (born 1935)
Porte-manteau Traviata, 1986
Estimate : 6000 / 8000 €
Throughout this time, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, Ben ran a shop in Nice called "Laboratoire 32" and later "La Galerie Ben doute de tout". A true living art object, it was a place for meetings, debates, or exhibitions of a whole fringe of the avant-garde, from the New Realists to Fluxus, via Support/Surface... It was bought in 1975 by the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Ben is also well known for his "Paintings" or "Writing Objects", which are distinguished by their white and curly writing standing out against a black background, and which have become a real trademark. In them he sets out aphorisms that question artistic practice, the human condition, or even truths that he describes as "objective and subjective".
Ben (Benjamin Vautier) (born 1935)
Il y a des jours où..., 1984
Estimate: 25000 / 35000 €
After a period of withdrawal in the 1980s, Ben, disappointed and weary of the contemporary art world, prefers, with the means at his disposal, to devote his time to a cause he considers more noble and less futile, the recognition of cultural minorities (ethnic, regional). It is thus far from the Parisian centralism in Marseille (M.A.C.) that his first retrospective exhibition "Ben, pour ou contre" was held in 1995, followed in 2001 by the exhibition "Je cherche la vérité. Ben" at the Museum of Modern Art in Nice.
