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06/28/2006: "Jean Sabrier"
The French artist Jean Sabrier is symbolic of the art community of Bordeaux: discreet and underground yet with an intense creativity and a will to push back the limits of art as we know it, to explore new aspects of the world and to incorporate these into an «ensemble» called artwork.
Born in 1951 in a small suburb of Bordeaux, Jean Sabrier doesn’t have an artistic education as such. What he knows he learnt throught looking at the world with wide open eyes and through the different contacts and friendships he has had through his life. His interest in art grew as his general curiosity did, giving him ideas and inspiration for his own personal research and his own art work.
The orginality of Jean Sabrier is to «pick» from different centuries, different styles of art and to reassemble them in his own curious way. His first inspiration is Paolo Uccello, from whom he received the passion of perspective. Jean Sabrier takes the rules of perspective and bends them in order to create his own. He is, in this respect, very similar to the «avant-garde» European artists of the beginning of the twentieth century, with the likes of Picasso or Matisse attempting to incorporate old rules and new ideas together as one.
The artistic revelation of Jean Sabrier came in the late seventies when he came face to face with the works of Marcel Duchamp. From this moment on, his work has been dedicated to reinventing what the great French master created, always basing himself on an object that Duchamp used and changing its meaning, once again by finding a new role for the object. Jean Sabrier has experimented with painting, sculpture and architecure. His latest mission is making Duchamp’s «Broyeuse de chocolat» come alive by computer animation. His art does not stop at steretotypes, classification or names; Jean Sabrier continues to explore the world thanks to his artistic gift, always attempting to bring answers to the numerous questions that spring up in his head.
His long-lasting friendship with England’s famous pop artist Richard Hamilton and their mutual passion for Duchamp and discovery of all that is new, has brought him a bit more into the spotlight. But he remains a discreet and humble man, simply striving to understand better the realms of the universe. In the restrictive yet enthusiastic circle of art amateurs and professionnals of Bordeaux he is widely respected and admired as one of the city’s leading contemporary artists.
