HENRI FOUCAULT

Professor and artistic consultant at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. Henri Foucault has always been a sculptor. His training in Isabelle Waldberg’s workshop at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux arts in Paris, associated with his big culture of the image, allowed him to develop very early an original approach. He so reinvented new forms of perception where sculpture and photography closely mix by playing, in particular, on the medium of the photo paper.

Since about twenty years, Henri Foucault is known for his photographic works (Retrospective at the Monnaie de Paris (2008), Les Nuits Blanches (2008), Biennale of Venice (2005), etc.) which is directly inspired by his work of sculpture developed in the 80’s. Indeed, his artistic approach always plays on two essential registers : to treat the main formal questions of the sculpture – the fullness, the hollow, the emptiness, the assemblage- as to question the glance of the viewer by deceiving materials so dense as the lead, the tin or even the zinc, by their use under shape ,among of others, of collages. To play with the light, the shapes and the materials are the characteristics of the sculptured and photographic practices of the artist.

At the Gallery Piece Unique is shown a new large sized sculpture named L’Espace entre Nous (The Space Between Us). Consisted of two parts, this artwork evokes the space between two forms, between two times or symbolically the space between the practices of the sculpture and the photography.

At the Gallery Unique Variations is presented a set of sculptures retracing the carrier of the artist. Conceived between 1987 and 2012, most of these sculptures were never been shown until then.