Jean-Marie Appriou: Ophelia

10 Oct-12 Nov 2022

Overview

Jean-Marie Appriou (1986, Brest, France) lives and works in Paris. Best known for his surreal sculptures of horses that stood at the entrance to Central Park in New York for a year, his sculptures evoke archaic forms and are inspired by contemporary but also mythological and futuristic worlds. Appriou’s works explore the design possibilities of materials such as aluminium, glass, bronze and clay through unconventional processes and combinations. The tool marks and fingerprints of his tactile process remain visible in the works that occupy his fantastical - sometimes disturbing - worlds. His new body of work takes inspiration from Victorian painter Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. Held in Tate Britain, the painting pictures the tragic-romantic figure Ophelia drowned in a stream, driven mad by the murder of her father by her lover Hamlet.
Appriou’s work has been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Lafayette Anticipations Fondation, Paris; the Vincent van Gogh Foundation; Château de Versailles, Versailles; the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo and at the Vienna Biennale among others. He was commissioned by Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York.

Artists