François MORELLET

Biography

François Morellet was born in 1926 in Cholet in France.

He studied Russian at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris (1945-1947), then worked in the Family Factory in Cholet and started painting.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1950 in Paris.

Dada above all, François Morellet explores minimal geometries in the 1950s.

From 1961 to 1968, he was one of the creators and protagonists of Kinetic Art within the Visual Art Research Group (GRAV) with five other artists: Francisco Sobrino, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, Yvaral and Joël Stein, as well as François and Vera Molnar.

He also participates in the international movement of the New Trend. In this context, he seeks to create an experimental art which is based on the scientific knowledge of visual perception and which is developed collectively.

In 1963, Morellet began to create works with neon tubes, like the American artist Dan Flavin.

After 1970, a third period began for him, marked by the creation of increasingly stripped-down works, which played with their support and the space that surrounded them. He then carried out a large number of architectural integrations, since his first monumental intervention on the Reynie plateau (Paris, Beaubourg) in 1971.

For Morellet, the work of art only refers to itself. Its title, generally sophisticated (the artist likes puns), indicates the rule of the game which presided over its development. He intends to control the process of creation and to demystify the romantic mythology of art and the artist, by justifying each of his choices by a principle established beforehand, which can also go as far as involving chance in certain components of the work.

Artist with strong international reputation using multiple supports like materials (fabrics, tables, adhesives, neon lights, surfaces of buildings, etc.), he enjoys a great consideration in France and in Germany manifested by a significant number of public orders and private as well as in many European countries such as Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands or the United States. His intervention on the site through an in situ practice made him explore the fields of installation and the environment.

Second artist to see a work exhibited at the Louvre in his lifetime, François Morellet inaugurated on January 27, 2010 a perennial decor commissioned by the Louvre Museum: L'esprit d'escalier.

He died on May 11, 2016, in Cholet, his hometown.