François Curlet

PiggyBan

Name: PiggyBan - François Curlet
Brand: Keijiban
Price: 180.000000 EUR
Availability: InStock

2023

Geta, Acrylic gouache, and print on Aluminium Composite Panel

Geta: 23.5 x 8.5 x 5 cm
Photograph: 18.8 × 29.2 cm

Edition of 15 copies numbered and signed by the artist, plus 3 artist’s proofs

Price

€180.00

Tax included・Free shipping in Japan

The edition

PiggyBan is the latest example of François Curlet’s distinctive practice of détournement and his sharp sense of the absurd. It combines a geta – a Japanese sandal made of a wooden base elevated with two “teeth” – with a photograph depicting someone standing with one foot in a shopping bag that features a smiling pig as a decoration. Just as it brings the resemblance between the animal and the traditional footwear to light – emphasized by its two snout-like pink dots –, PiggyBan ultimately proves elusive. As soon as our minds seemingly begin to make sense of these formal echoes and of its title, which contains a pun, the work mischievously short-circuits our quest for meaning and asks us to push against the confines of our imaginations even further.

The artist

François Curlet was born in 1967 in Paris, France. He now lives in Brussels, Belgium.

François Curlet describes his work as an acceleration or immobilization of signs. Beyond any determined medium, these indeed form the very material of his works: the mass of signs — deeply rooted into a specific culture or globally shared in our connected world — to which we are daily subjected. For more than thirty years, the artist has been constantly distorting and remixing them, be it a traditional djellaba seemingly designed by Nike, an Ebay logo converted into an abstract painting, a peanut-selling stand for an out-of-work Charlie Brown, or a wooden surfboard for Canadian lumberjacks. In the vein of dadaist and situationist practices, Curlet disrupt the connections between certain objects and materials and their cultural references and established meanings, providing us with a Lewis Carroll-esque world governed only by the law of humour, poetry and free association.

François Curlet has shown widely in Europe (Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, MACs). His work is held by numerous public collections, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, MACBA (Barcelona), and the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands.

His work is represented by Air de Paris (Paris) and Galerie Micheline Szwajcer (Antwerp).

The exhibition