Théo
Mercier

Théo Mercier, born in 1984 in Paris, is a plastic artist, sculptor, and stage director. As a true autodidact, he claims since his inception great formal freedom, working to build the mechanisms of a history of art and objects in which he builds back harmonious contradictions similar to contemporary apocryphal stories. It imposes paradox, strangeness and humor as a plastic point of view. It results in a sprawling work, a cosmogony populated by dystopian myths, iconoclastic sculptures and exquisite corpses in which images and clichés, dominant and dominated discourses, fantasies, unconscious and collective representations confront each other in an orderly cacophony. Drawing on the world and during his travels the raw material of his work, Théo Mercier leads a reflection at the crossroads of anthropology, geopolitics and tourism. Between stage set in choreographed scenes and explorations of raw material, he combines a practice of creator and collector, through which he sets up a rich exchange between past, present and future, life and death, animated and inanimate, true and false, artisanal and industrial, profane and sacred, real and fiction. Most of Théo Mercier’s pieces are the result of object anthropomorphization work - from findings, assemblies, precarious stacks or grafts - which he most often creates in series, constituting real communities. Gone through Matthew Barney’s workshop in 2008, he was awarded the following year, the HSBC Prize Jury’s favorite for the photography. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, notably «Dynasty» at the Palais de Tokyo (2010), and benefited two solo exhibitions at the Hunting Museum and Nature (2012 and 2019). He is the author of numerous shows and performances, including, recently, «Affordable solution for better living» presented in 2018 at the Amandiers theater in Nanterre. After the book All you can eat in 2012, Éditions Dilecta is preparing the publication of an artist monograph to be published in the spring 2020. He was resident at Villa Medici in 2013 and nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2014. In 2019, he won the Silver Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale.


He is represented in Paris by the Mor Charpentier gallery.

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