Art H.3M Bernard Quentin

Project for the inauguration of Centre Georges Pompidou
Manufacture JC KELLER, Paris

Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou

Exhibition
2021-2022, AERODREAM, Centre Georges Pompidou-Metz, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, France

The artist

An artist borrowing from modernity, Bernard Quentin was a key player in the development of twentieth century art. His plastic research beyond the classical forms of painting and sculpture of the early 1960s coincided with his new passion for air and pneumatic sculpture. He then produced totemic statues and especially his first inflatable sculptures (the Cybules, the Venus of Chicago) which, called for monumental interventions in the landscapes, would be seen as heralds of Land Art.

“My sculptures can simulate life because I can manage precisely through a certain programming to make them evolve, to make them breathe, to make them throb, to make them shudder. I can even get them to change their mood if I want to. They can have their own regulation. (…) Since I cannot represent reality as I see it, I am trying precisely, in the second degree by palpitations, tremors, to apprehend reality by all this tactile side, all the intimate rhythms, the great cosmic rhythms themselves, and the whole mystery of biology ”(interview for“ the avant-garde ”, 1968