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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); Cloud Seven, Brussels (2021); LE SILO:
Collection Jean-Philippe & Françoise Billarant, Marines
(2022); The Island Club, Limassol (2022); and
MUCEM - Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la
Méditerranée, Marseille (2022.)
In 2003 he was awarded the Fondation Ricard Prize.
In 2023/2024, 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,
titled "MATTHIEU LAURETTE: UNE RÉTROSPECTIVE DÉRIVÉE
(1993-2023)" covering about thirty years of work
accompanied by a comprehensive monograph.
19_candidature_ZHDK_190821 -Kitty copie 4_edit- copie
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, Paris; 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; Le Silo - Collection Jean-Philippe &
Françoise Billarant, Paris/Marines;
Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Brussels; Iwan & Manuela Wirth,
Zürich/London; The Jerry Speyer Family Collection, New York...
"One of the first
“new media” artists to have operated in the '90s, 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 the 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.
- "MATTHIEU LAURETTE: UNE RÉTROSPECTIVE
DÉRIVÉE (1993-2023)" at MAC VAL -
Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne,
Vitry-sur-Seine, France, curated by guest
curator Cédric Fauq, Chief Curator at CAPC, in conjunction
with MAC VAL Director Nicolas Surlapierre will open in
October 2023 during Paris+ par Art Basel Week. The
retrospective will be accompanied by a comprehensive
monograph designed by the graphic designer duo SYNDICAT.
Current & recent exhibitions and projects include:
- 'Le Silo 6 : Oeuvres de la collection Jean-Philippe
& Françoise Billarant', Le Silo, Marines,
France (5 June 2022 - 2024)
- 'Matthieu Laurette, DEMANDS & SUPPLIES «A
holiday for the artist was purchased by
____________________________.»' DDD KUNST HOUSE,
Yerevan, Armenia, (23 December 2022 – 07 January 2023)
- 'THINGS: Purchased With Funds Provided By
___________', Global Demix Studio, Paris, France
(Ongoing)
- 'And All You See is Glory', The Island
Club, Limassol, Cyprus (21 October – 19 November 2022)
- 'L'ami.e modéle', MUCEM - Musée des
civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, Marseille,
France (15 October - 12 December 2022)
- 'Janelas', Musée d'art moderne et
contemporain - Saint-Étienne Métropole, Saint-Étienne,
France (15 October - 31 December 2022)
- 'Stencils, Art in the public spaces',
Charleroi, Belgium (1 April - 31 December 2022)
DEMANDS
& SUPPLIES, conceived as an ongoing retrospective and
a full financial disclosure of all costs and expenses
incurred in the past 10 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, and 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 for
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 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, color
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, color / Black &
White
1998, ed. Galerie Jousse Seguin (Paris). PDF File size: 45,9 mo (High resolution)
For press, interviews, and image requests please write to this address with your name,
address, publication, request, and comments.
Matthieu Laurette's images are protected by the Authors' Rights
(Intellectual Property Law). Any publication, reproduction,
exhibition or type and context of use should be declared at ADAGP (French collective
administration organization for the rights of authors in the
visual arts) www.adagp.fr or to its sister societies which
oversee Matthieu Laurette's rights on their territories: i.e.
Canada (SODRAC), Belgium (SABAM), Germany (BILD KUNST), Italy
(SIAE), Japan (JVACS), Korea (SACK), Netherlands (BEELDRECHT),
Spain (VEGAP), Sweden (BUS), Switzerland (PROLITTERIS), UK
(DACS), USA (ARS), etc…
BIOGRAPHY >> go to: [top][biography][current][contact][downloads][mailinglist][press & images request]
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).
"One of the first
“new media” artists to have operated in the '90s, 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 the 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."
PDF File size: 16,6 mo (High resolution)