Garouste and his works: paintings, sculptures

BIOGRAPHY OF Gérard Garouste

He was born on March 10, 1946 in Paris. He was a student at the Collège du Montcel. He met his wife, Elisabeth, who supported him throughout his life, especially through his delirium. He studied at the fine arts school from 1965 to 1972, with Gustave Singier, the abstract painter, as his master. At that time he began to be interested in Marcel Duchamp and conceptual art. A friend of the director Jean-Michel Ribes, he created a large number of stage designs with him and practiced humor drawing. In 1977, at the Palace, he presented the first show of which he was the author, set designer and director. In 1979, he moved to the Eure, but continued to work at the Palace until 1982 as a painter and set designer. It was while he was still attending the Palace, in the late 1970s, that an exhibition of Jean Dubuffet's work as well as works of art brut encouraged him to turn to figurative painting. He is now 76 years old. He continues to leave his mark on the world with his allegorical and mythological paintings.

He exhibited paintings for the first time in 1980 at the Durand-Dessert Gallery with figurative, allegorical and mythological art. In 1982, he exhibited internationally at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, then at Leo Castelli and Sperone, as well as at the Zeitgeist exhibition in Berlin, where he was the only French artist invited. He received real recognition from institutions in 1987, when he presented his oils on canvas and acrylics on Indian paper at the CAPC in Bordeaux, then at the Cartier Foundation.
 

 

Strengthened by his successes, he realized decors and works for the Elysee Palace, sculptures for the cathedral of Evry, but also the ceiling of the theater of Namur, a magnificent fresco on the walls of the wedding hall of the city hall of Mons and, also, the stained glass windows of Notre-Dame de Talant. In 1989, at Châtelet, he will be in charge of the realization of the stage curtain of the theater.

In 1991, he created La Source, an association located in La Guéroulde, in the Eure region, whose goal is to help children in situations of exclusion or coming from disadvantaged backgrounds to blossom through artistic workshops led by professionals.

In 1996, he received a commission from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for a monumental work using both paint and wrought iron. He became increasingly interested in sculpture and engraving, as well as in the illustration of universal texts, such as the Haggadah or Don Quixote. In 2001, he presented a project to the Cartier Foundation. Named Ellipse, it is a set of paintings to be mounted on an architecture that he designed. In 2008, he was commissioned by the State to create a model of an Aubusson tapestry. The work, monumental, is 24 m2 and is called The Murex and the Spider. It is installed in the town hall of Aubusson, in the main staircase.
 

Towards the end of the 1990s, he learned Hebrew and studied the Bible intensively. His figurative works will often refer to it.

In 2009, he published L'Intranquille, an autobiographical account through which he publicly reveals his heavy family history and his psychiatric problems. His father, Henri Auguste Garouste (1919-2008) was a convinced Petainist and anti-Semite who was sentenced in 1945 to pay back the Levitan establishments after having robbed them during the war. Throughout his life, Gérard Garouste did his best to distance himself from his parents and believed that the origin of his mental disorders lay in this family history. He claims to have suffered regular bouts of delusions and depression from the birth of his first child, Guillaume. He was treated in the Paul-Guiraud hospital in Villejuif and Saint-Anne.

Since 2001, he has been represented by the Daniel Templon Gallery. He regularly exhibits there. In 2009, he collaborated with the philosopher Michel Onfray on an exhibition at the media library in Argentan. In 2013 he played alongside Catherine Deneuve in the film Elle s'en va by Emmanuelle Bercot. On December 13, 2013, he was elected to George Mathieu's seat at the Academy of Fine Arts.