Jean-Marie Appriou

About

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present a showcase of outdoor sculptures by the French artist Jean-Marie Appriou. Appriou's sculptures appear archaic, evoking mythology and forms of primitive art, while crafted from the very contemporary material of aluminum.

On this occasion, four cast aluminum Cypress trees will be placed on Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s roof terrace, creating an open-air installation overlooking the city of Zurich. Appriou’s work often refers to the Symbolists, and here he is referencing Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. Cypress trees carry the weight of the space between life and death, earth and sky. Their silhouettes are as gracious as they are haunting.

Jean-Marie Appriou was born in 1986 in Brest, France, and lives and works in Paris, France. Appriou graduated from École régionale des beaux-arts de Rennes in 2010. In September 2019, Appriou will be the subject of his first institutional exhibition in the United States, The Horses, organized by Public Art Fund in New York's Central Park. Appriou will also be included in the Biennale de Lyon, August 2019, and have a solo exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon, in fall 2019. His first solo exhibition entitled Sonde d’arc-en-taupe was held in 2014 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France. In 2018, Appriou was featured as the inaugural artist in Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Open Space program, which invites artists to create site-specific projects to appear within the Fondation’s Frank Gehry designed building in Paris. Selected institutional group exhibitions include Childhood: Another banana for the dream-fish, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR, 2018; Neuer Norden Zürich, KiöR Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, Zurich, CH, 2018; Deux sens du décoratif, Centre d’art Contemporain, Brest, FR, 2018; Voyage d’Hiver, Château de Versailles, Versailles, FR, 2017; Robots. Work. Our Future, Vienna Biennale 2017, Vienna, AT, 2017; MEDUSA, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR, 2017; Streams of Warm Impermanence, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, GB, 2016; L'Usage des Formes, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR, 2015 and in La solitude, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, NO, 2014.