Patrick Neu — Eva Meyer Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 14 → February 26, 2011

Patrick Neu was born in 1963 and lives and works in Wingen-sur-Moder near Strasbourg. He obtained a graduate degree in 1986 from the École supérieure d’art décoratif in Strasbourg where he was Sarkis’ student. It was moreover at Sarkis’ invitation, in 2007, that he took part in two exhibitions, one at the Louvre and the other at the Musée Bourdelle. He was a resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome in 1995 and in 1999 at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. In 1997, invited by Didier Semin and Georges Didi-Huberman, he participated in the exhibition Empreinte, at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

He was represented in Paris by the Patricia Dorfmann gallery from 1995 to 1997 and by the Arlogos gallery from 1998 to 2001. More recently, he took part, in 2009, in the Printemps de septembre à Toulouse and, in 2010, in the opening exhibition of the Centre Pompidou-Metz Chef-d’oeuvre. Le Mamco of Geneva published a monograph about him (2009-2010), Dans la suie des images et les iris de la pensée.

In his work on Patrick Neu, Didier Semin reveals¹, in the text he devoted to the artist, that the challenge of the exhibition Empreinte “was to understand, as precisely as possible, how the works were made”. Patrick Neu is part of this constellation of artists who do have knowledge in the important decision that should lead to the realization of a work. His work is rooted in art history, history of science and technology. His knowledge is lined by a deep understanding of artistic gestures closest and most distant in time. It also interacts well with his contemporaries, with the goldsmiths of ancient or Grünewald that it is no less today. The large gap between knowledge and continuous experiments, between specific procedures and ideas to implement, partly explains the technical achievement that represents each piece that comes out of the workshop and also explains the miraculous aspect that’s sum up and wonder.

¹ Didier Semin, Locus Solus, 57, Sublimation des pattes de moineau, in Patrick Neu, L’instant n’en finit pas, édition du Frac Lorraine, 2008.