Art Club #35 Jean-Marie Appriou

June 25 to September 4, 2022
Curator: Pier Paolo Pancotto

Since its creation in 2016, the Art Club brings works by international contemporary artists into dialogue with the centuries-old heritage of the Académie de France in Rome. This summer, Villa Medici is delighted to welcome French artist and sculptor Jean-Marie Appriou for his first solo exhibition in Italy, and to unveil a series of never-before-seen pieces in the Villa Medici gardens.

These recent creations take up the central figures of his practice, whose deeply dreamlike plastic universe is imbued with telluric preoccupations. With a mastery of technique, Jean-Marie Appriou uses the materials of sculpture – aluminum, bronze, glass, clay and wax – to depict fantastical worlds inhabited by human, animal and plant figures.

Horses, snakes, locusts, sharks and seahorses make up a bestiary charged with powerful symbolism, while her figures of sowers, gatherers and beekeepers embody figures of passage and transformation. The transition between elements – from aquatic to aerial, from underground to terrestrial – is one of the central themes of the artist’s work. His sculpture combines the allegorical and the sensual; the artist likes to leave visible the imprint of his fingers on the material. He weaves a paradoxical narrative that unites past and future in a series of hallucinatory ecstasies. In the gardens of Villa Medici, the presence of Jean-Marie Appriou’s work takes on a special dimension.

Visitors are invited to stroll through the loggias (Loggia Balthus and Loggia de Cléopâtre), the carré des Niobides, the Gypsothèque and the Chambre des oiseaux, Ferdinand de Médicis’s former private study. Between the alcoves, columned arcades and mazes of vegetation, the artist “sows” his imagined works in echo to the figures and myths that have populated the gardens of Villa Medici for centuries.

THE ARTIST

Jean-Marie Appriou, born in 1986 in Brest, lives and works as a sculptor in Paris. His work has been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, the Musée des abattoirs, Toulouse, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Consortium Museum, Dijon, and the Biennale de Lyon. He is invited by the Public Art Fund to present an ensemble of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, southeast entrance to Central Park, New York, at the Château de Versailles, and at the Vienna Biennale. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in the galleries Jan Kaps, Cologne, Eva Presenhuber, Zurich and New York, Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo, C L E A R I N G, New York and Brussels.

With the support of :

JAN KAPS
GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER
C L E A R I N G
PERROTIN
MASSIMO DE CARLO

Photo credits :

Portrait of Pier Paolo Pancotto: © Daniele Molajoli
Portrait of Jean-Marie Appriou: © Claire Dorn pour la galerie Perrotin