Some of the greatest artists in the world come from France, a trend that continues to the present day. As a result, we now have several established as well as emerging French artists, who exhibit creative and diverse talents and unique ways of expressing themselves through multiple media.
These artists are adept at working with film, photography, murals, paintings, sculpture, and other media. Known for their ability to present subjective as well as objective approaches to subjects and themes, their unique works, projects, and photo series are truly captivating. They have exhibited their works at several solo and group exhibitions and have even won awards.
If you are interested in French art, you have to get acquainted with the following emerging visual artists from France.
Isabelle Cornaro
Educated in art history at the Ecole du Louvre, Isabelle Cornaro is deeply interested in the influence of history and culture on the human race. She has worked with multiple media, including sculpture, film, installation, and painting. Each work of work she has produced indicates and explores the half lecherous, half sentimental relationship people have with objects, especially in crowded places such as flea markets.
Cornaro won the Prix Richard Award in 2010. She has also presented several solo exhibitions in France and abroad.
Cyprien Gaillard
Born in Paris in 1980, Cyprien Gaillard has tasted immense artistic success in France as well as overseas. Educated at the L’Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, he has produced and exhibited works of art in 30+ solo exhibitions worldwide.
While creating his works, Gaillard experiments with a variety of media, including film, installation, photography, sculpture, and performance. His work sheds light on subjects such as cultural development, civilization, impacts of human activities, decay processes, and the tense relationship between nature and architecture.
He has won multiple awards in recognition of his talent, some of which are the prestigious National Gallery Prize for Young Art in 2011 and the Prix Marcel Duchamp Award in 2010.
Camille Henrot
Born in 1978 in Paris, Henrot studied film animation at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs. Later, she worked as an assistant to Pierre Huyghe, a mixed media artist. She has ample experience making music videos and creating advertisements.
Her work is inspired by diverse subjects such as the zoetrope, a nineteenth-century pre-film animation device that delivers the illusion of motion; the ikebana, which is the Japanese art of flower arrangement; ethnographic movies, and telephone hotlines, to mention just a few. It also reflects her keen interest in anthropology, literature, and philosophy. She rarely creates a piece without first putting in several hours of research.
Today, she lives in New York and continues to produce stunning works using a variety of media such as film, installation, painting, and sculpture.
JR
A French street artist and photographer signing his art as JR as he prefers to remain anonymous, JR calls himself a “photograffeur,” which is a combination of the two words “graffeur,” which means graffiti artist in French, and photographer. His specialty is creating huge photographic images in black-and-white in a wide range of public places.
According to JR, the world’s biggest art gallery is the street. Through his street art, JR challenges reductive images and preconceptions propagated through the media and advertisements. His work is a combination of action and art, dealing with the issues of limitations, identity, commitment, and freedom.
JR won the TED Prize in 2011 and used the prize money of $100,000 to launch an artistic project called “Inside Out.” He also featured in Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people of 2018.
Born on Feb 22, 1983, in France, JR started his career as a teenager with a keen interest in graffiti. Later, photography changed the way he perceived street art. In 2005, he photographed the French riots and launched his first major photographic project, which involved putting up the prints all over the city.
JR freely exhibits his works on streets all over the world. He also invites viewers and bystanders to help him out with his street art. He aims to capture the attention of people who hardly visit museums.
Emilie Pitoiset
Based in Paris, Emilie Pitoiset deals with a variety of media, including film, performance, installation, and sculpture. Her art highlights the instability of narratives through rituals, fictional characters, seeking meaning, re-enactment, and others. She attempts to explore the subjective space between object and gesture.
In 2012, Emilie Pitoiset was nominated for the prestigious Prix Richard Award. In 2010, she bagged the Audi Talent Award. She has exhibited her work at several group and solo exhibitions all over Europe.
Antoine Mercusot
Born in Dijon in 1982, Antoine Mercusot now resides in Paris. In the late eighties, he flipped through a magazine and saw Irving Penn’s portfolio. This stirred up within him a deep interest in portraiture and photographer.
In 2007, he started working as a freelance photographer and participated in several artistic projects involving movies, architectural photography, portraits, and documentaries. For example, Fiction, one of his photographic series deals with still-life portraits inside architectural models, featuring tiny worlds created with unusual material such as plastic, paper, cardboard, and timber.
Mercusot is known for his ability to hunt for situations between the imaginary and the plausible. Owing to his knowledge and experience of architecture photography, he is familiar with volumes, and this familiarity along with his artistic imagination leads him to take photos that work wonders on our senses.
Mercusot’s work makes us ponder over the place of each human being within different social contexts.
Goulwen “Leyto” Mahe
Born in Saint-Brieux in 1980, Goulwen “Leyto” Mahe burst into Brittany’s graffiti scene in the early nineties. He can create graffiti not only on city streets, factories, and unused industrial sites but also on canvas.
Later, the graffiti artist came under the influence of famous artists such as Dotremont, Alechinsky, De Kooning, and Pollock. Under their influence, he embarked on the task of liberating letters from the alphabet, modifying them in such a way that they developed a character of their own, becoming almost poetic and sometimes appearing violent.
Mahe is known for his free spirit, inspired by the different cultures he comes across in his travels. His works range from enormous wall frescoes to colourful abstracts, and through these, he makes us appreciate the intriguing universe of expressionism.
His letters do not look like they form part of any alphabet, and his works of calligraphy take us to a world of music and chaos. By introducing murals and paintings into the media of graffiti, Layto has achieved something totally different in the world of visual art.