CtC’s Artist of the Month is Patrick Neu (Bitche, 1963) who lives and works in Alsace.
His works are oxymorons, bringing together irreconcilable shapes and textures. He uses materials and techniques of craft art: wood, soot on glass, wax, eggshells, shed snakeskin, and then turns their traditional use on its head, pushing boundaries and taking things to the very limits of their capabilities. Crystal is his favourite: simultaneously sharp and heavy, fragile and transparent.
For 30 years, he has been developing his skills away from the limelight and now he is exhibiting in a solo show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, where it is possible to see some examples of his exquisite craftsmanship. Among other works, a jacket made of bees wings created with a perilous technique, smoke-blackened wine glasses and cabinets with scenes from the history of art so they can be viewed from new and original perspectives, wax shaped bird wings, a crystal version of Christ’s crown of thorns, broken crystals on the floor delicate and dangerous at the same time.
He is able to give visibility to things previously confined to the realms of the imagination.
“These things seem fragile but in fact, all of life is fragile. I am not trying to make a work fragile, nor condemn it to extinction, it’s simply the way in which I go about things”. (Patrick Neu)
Patrick Neu graduated from Strasbourg’s Ecole Supérieure d’Art Décoratif in 1986. In 2007, he took part in two exhibitions, one in the Louvre and the other at the Musée Bourdelle in Paris. His work has since featured in collective exhibitions. He was a resident of the Villa Medici in Rome in 1995 and Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 1999. His first solo exhibition was in 2008 at the FRAC Lorraine (Metz, France).
Silvia Meloni
CuratingtheContemporary (CtC) 