*** Welcome to WWW.LAURETTE.NET a (now) one-page
website gathering irregularly (since
1999) information about some of MATTHIEU
LAURETTE's activities and data. ***
Matthieu Laurette (born 1970 in
Villeneuve Saint Georges, France) is a media and conceptual
contemporary French artist who works in a variety of media, from
TV and video to installation and public interventions. Laurette
uses various strategies to explore the relationships between
conceptual art, Pop art, Institutional Critique, economics and
contemporary society. In 1993, Laurette declared himself an artist
in a French TV gameshow called Tournez manège (The Dating
Game). When the presenter asked him who he was he replied: 'A
multimedia artist'. Laurette had sent out invitations to an
art audience to view the show on TV from their homes. His
best known works are Apparitions (1993-ongoing); Money-back Products
(Produits
remboursés) (1991–2001); Citizenship Project (1996-ongoing);
El Gran Trueque (2000); Déjà vu, The International Look-alike
Conventions (2000-ongoing); I
AM AN ARTIST (1998-ongoing); THINGS: Purchased With Funds Provided By(2010-ongoing);
DEMANDS & SUPPLIES (2012-ongoing); Tropicalize Me! (2011-ongoing).
Laurette's work has been
shown in venues such as Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Soho, New
York (1998); the ICA-Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
(1999 & 2003); de Appel, Amsterdam (2000 & 2013); 49th
Venice Biennale (2001); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2001);
Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2002); Artsonje Center, Seoul (2002);
Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003 & 2006); Biennal de Pontevedra
(2004); P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, N.Y (2005);
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005); Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris
(2005); Kunsthalle & Kunstforum, Vienna (2005); the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2006); MoMA-Museum of Modern Art,
New York (2007); MNAM-Centre Pompidou, Paris (1997, 2000, 2004,
2007 & 2009); Z33, Hasselt (2012); Mac/Val - Musée
d'art contemporain du Val de Marne, Vitry-sur Seine (2012, 2015,
2016); Museo La Tertulia, Cali (2013); Parallel, Oaxaca (2014);
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2015); FRAC Haute-Normandie, Rouen
(2016); Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico D.F (2016), IVAM,
Valencia (2017); MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (2018); Solar dos
Abacaxis, Rio de Janeiro (2018); CN D Centre National de la
Danse, Pantin (2019); Casa Sarayu, Pueblo Nuevo/Mindo, Ecuador (2020), Silicon Malley, Prilly (2020)
CNEAI, Paris (2021) and Cloud Seven, Brussels (2021).
In 2003 he was awarded the Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard Prize.
In 2022/2023, MAC VAL - Musée d'Art Contemporain du
Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine (and more venues to be announced)
will dedicate him a large-scale mid-career retrospective,
covering about thirty years of work and will be accompanied by a
comprehensive monograph.
19_candidature_ZHDK_190821 -Kitty copie 4_edit- copie
2.pages
His works are in several public, corporate and private
collections including Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre
Pompidou, Paris; CNAP/FNAC, National Fund for
Contemporary Art, Paris; Mac/Val - Musée d'art
contemporain du Val de Marne, Vitry-sur Seine; CNEAI =
Centre National Edition Art Image, Chatou; FRAC-Collection Aquitaine,
Bordeaux; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Poitou- Charentes,
Angoulême; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Collection Gregory
Papadimitriou, Athens; William Grant and Sons Ltd, Dufftown; La Coleccíon Berezdivin, San Juan, Puerto
Rico; Jean-Philippe & Françoise
Billarant, Paris/Marines;
Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Brussels; Iwan & Manuella Wirth,
Zürich; The Speyer Family Collection , New York...
"One of the
first “new media” artists to have operated in the 90’s,
Matthieu Laurette has used stereotypes, role models and
processes borrowed from the media and more largely from the
idea of the “Society of the Spectacle,” thoroughly in his
work. His practice directly questions the relationship
between art and life, from his first works in which he
appeared on popular television programs to later more
complex apparatuses about value and economic circulation,
and now to his current work, which is centered on the
artistic persona itself, registering actions via
certificates, photographs, and social media. Having used
dematerialization as his main strategy for over 20 years,
Laurette can be seen as a visionary precursor of current
artistic strategies affirming the virtual and the network as
effective, IRL artistic material."
—— Dorothée Dupuis in Terremoto.mx, 2014.
"Accumulator
or otaku of Contemporary art, Matthieu
Laurette is a demanding artist in the sense that he manages
to integrate into his work all the elements or data that
participate in the preparation, production, presentation,
distribution, mediation, promotion and reception of his
work."
——
Arthur Fouray in Actes
du Colloque Vues & Données, 2020, ENSP, France.
"What
particularly attracts me to your work, Matthieu, is that you
take the viewer out of the art-world context –
serendipitously, intelligently – before throwing them right
back into it again because, let’s be honest, who the hell
would care otherwise. But you are clearly working in the
real world with real values with things that are part of
everybody’s daily life."
——
Seth Siegelaub in Frieze, No.154, Apr. 2013.
"Matthieu
Laurette is "using society as a catalog of forms...he plays
with economic forms as if they were the lines and colors of
a painting."
——
Nicolas Bourriaud in 'Post Production', 2002, ed. Sternberg
Press.
“ Laurette
imagined a system to eat without spending money, thanks to
sales promotions on the first purchase refunded. It's of
interest to me. Thus the route inside the (Venice Biennal)
Corderia ends with the work of artists working around food
stores.
—— Harald
Szeemann, "The idea of Total Art Turned out to Be a Utopia" in
Le Monde, 2001.
.
DEMANDS & SUPPLIES, conceived as an ongoing
retrospective and a full financial disclosure of
all costs and expenses incurred in the past nine
years of Matthieu Laurette's practice as an
artist, DEMANDS &
SUPPLIES (2012—ongoing) picks up the story
left off at the artist's eponymous exhibition in
2012 at Gaudel de Stampa in Paris and subsequently
at Silicon Malley in Lausanne in 2020/2021. In
contrast to Chris Burden, who made public his
profit and loss (Full Financial Disclosure, 1977)
as decorative "collages" of canceled checks, bank
statements, tax forms which he called "drawings,"
Matthieu Laurette is proposing since 2012, through
a commercial arrangement, simple two-line
contracts that allow his expenses to be acquired.
Rather than producing or exhibiting a single
material object, Matthieu Laurette generates
financial "exhaust" - his bills and debts — to be
paid for by collectors.
Today anyone can become a collector on www.demandsandsupplies.art
an online sales website powered by
Shopify available and shipping worldwide.
As the artist explained in a discussion with Seth
Siegelaub in Frieze (2013): "DEMANDS
& SUPPLIES, consists entirely of
contracts—say, a contract that a collector could
purchase the cost of my phone deals, the rent of
my studio or have a dinner with me and stuff
like that."
Matthieu Laurette considers his basic artist’s
expenses as production costs that are then doubled
to define the selling price of the work, ranging
from 207.66 euros for Matthieu Laurette’s
2015 mobile phone bills were purchased by
____________________________, up to 31,909.14
euros for the entirety of his 2019 expenses. These
works, available for online order are unique
printed contracts in A4 or US letter format
(dimensions variable according to collector's
location), which must be signed by both
parties—the collector and the artist—to be then
framed in an artist's frame (size: 37.5 x 29 x 3.5
cm).
In 1993, when asked on a French TV game show
called Tournez Manège (The Dating Game)
to describe himself, Matthieu Laurette replied, "A
multimedia artist." He has since been exploring
the relationship between art and society with an
œuvre that he characterizes as "IRL Institutional
Critique." His body of work seeks to show
inconsistencies or flaws in the systems imposed by
late capitalism and Spectacle. This project
reduces an artistic work to the exhaustive list of
expenses necessary to its own conception.
Furthermore, it questions the value that any
person, including the artist himself, can place on
a work, including all that it can be brought to
encompass, conceal, or even disguise. Reduced to
an increasingly essential data for many artists
—financial data — DEMANDS &
SUPPLIES displays a raw look at what is the
lived reality of an artist today.
Download here: Matthieu Laurette, COMMODITIES featuring Jeff Koons, Robert
Ryman and Andy Warhol.
Exh. cat. 24 pages, colour
2004, ed. Deweer Art Gallery (Otegem). PDF File size : 9,2 mo (High resolution)
Download here: Matthieu Laurette presents Free Sample Demix. Essay by Alexis Vaillant; documentation of works 1993-1998;
biography; exhibition chronology; bibliography. ed. 1000, not
numbered..
Artist publication / Exh. cat. 96 pages, colour / Black &
White
1998, ed. Galerie Jousse Seguin (Paris). PDF File size : 45,9 mo (High resolution)