20th-century French Art - Contemporary Art in France

Contemporary Art in France

Many contemporary artists continue to be haunted by the horrors of the war and the specter of the holocaust. Christian Boltanski's harrowing installations of the lost and the anonymous are particularly powerful.

The work of his wife Annette Messager, who represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, deals with issues of identity and feminism.

The photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.

Beginning in the 1980s, the Figuration Libre movement was constituted around French outstanding figures like Remi Blanchard, François Boisrond, Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa and Richard Di Rosa and Louis Jammes. Between 1982 and 1985, these artists expose on several occasions with their American counterparts: Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Tseng Kwong Chi, and inter alia, Crash (exhibitions in New York, London, Pittsburgh, Paris,…). The Figuration Libre falls under the prolongation of artists and historical movements whose specificity was the opening to marginalized forms of expression, as the Cubism had opened with African and Oceanian art, Surrealism with the children's and "art brut" drawings, Pop art with publicity and comic strip.

Pierre et Gilles (Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard), are gay French artistic and romantic partners. They produce highly stylized photographs, building their own sets and costumes as well as retouching the photographs. Their work often features images from popular culture, gay culture including porn (especially James Bidgood), and religion.

Other important contemporary French artists include Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Orlan, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Daniel Buren, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Pierre Huyghe, Valérie Mréjen.