The 36-year-old French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet, who lives and works in Paris, has been chosen to represent France at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
Born in 1986, Creuzet’s career has experienced a rapid ascent in recent years after winning the Camden Arts Centre Emerging Artist Prize at the 2019 edition of Frieze London. Over the past year, he has had institutional exhibitions at LUMA in Arles and the Camden Art Centre in London. He has also had solo shows in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in 2021 and, in 2019, at the Palais de Tokyo.
Julien Creuzet, Subjective heritage, there are unknown parts in us that isolate us a little more every day. We dream about it, so many phantasmagorical, digital illusions, we just have to list our nightmares: Shell – Red-bellied Orthodox Wing from Trinidad and Tobago – Machete – Cocaine – RNA Messenger – Head of a red-bellied ortalid from Trinidad – English Lion – Sugar cane (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Document, Chicago.
Working both as a visual artist and a poet, Creuzet fuses the two art forms into suspended sculptures and wall pieces made out of found materials, including waste. These intricate works are then grouped together to create complex installations. Textually, Creuzet borrows from the writings of intellectual figures and philosophers like Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire to examine his relationship to his ancestral home of Martinique, the diasporic experience, and the history of French colonialism.
Creuzet was apparently unanimously chosen by the selection committee, which is chaired by the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Chiara Parisi, France’s minister for Europe and foreign affairs, Catherine Colonna, and minister for culture, Rima Abdul Malak.
“In his work, poetry infuses with strength and generosity a plurality of practices: sculpture, text, video, music, performance, and new technologies,” the committee said in a statement. “These different elements compose immersive and multi-sensory worlds animated by whispered memories. His singular practice and his talent for oral literature are guided by creolization and bring together a diversity of materials, stories, shapes, and gestures.”
“We are incredibly proud of Julien to be representing France in the next Venice Biennale, this is a major career achievement for him,” said Sibylle Friche, a partner at Creuzet’s gallery Document, in a statement to Artnet News. “It has been a privilege to accompany him the last five years, and we are excited to see his vision and poetics unfold in the French pavilion in 2024.”
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