Jean-Michel Alberola, who has been represented by Galerie Templon for over thirty years, is back at the Impasse Beaubourg space with an exhibition featuring oils on canvas, works on paper, mural paintings and neon sculptures.

A leading and genre-breaking figure on the French art scene, Jean-Michel Alberola seeks to create protean works that move seamlessly between conceptual, abstract and figurative art. Paintings, gouaches, sculptures, artists’ books and films represent the different facets of his quest.

Jean-Michel Alberola favours a working method based on fragmentation and superimposition, combining words with the language of shapes. Fragments of bodies or geographies linked to ambiguous statements and commands turn his works into philosophical conundrums. The question of perception and the role played by the artist and by painting predominates. The artist adopts a humorous and poetic approach in his commitment to asking wider questions, mixing artistic deliberations with political and social questioning.

Born in 1953, Jean-Michel Alberola made his name in the early 1980s with the return of figurative art and Cultivated Painting. His artwork has been on display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2005), Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy (2008), Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2009) and Maison Hermès in Tokyo (2009). His latest film, Koyamaru, portraying a remote village in rural Japan, was shown on the Arte television channel in 2011. His work has recently been featured in a variety of exhibitions including Mathématiques, un dépaysement soudain at the Cartier Foundation, Néons  at La Maison Rouge and Les Maîtres du désordre at the Musée du Quai Branly (2012) as well as Les Aventures de la vérité at the Fondation Maeght in 2013.

The Palais de Tokyo is holding a major retrospective of his work in 2015.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Galerie Daniel Templon