Presentation House Gallery and Emily Carr University of Art + Design are pleased to present an artist talk by Paris-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard.
Between iconoclasm and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art, the work of Cyprien Gaillard questions man’s traces in nature with an archeological approach to recent history. Through sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large-scale interventions in public space, Gaillard examines the relics of our built environment with an entropic view of destruction as the starting point of renewal.
Gaillard’s most recent work Artefact is a film shot on the artist’s iPhone and later transferred to 35mm film. The film traces the ancient city of Babylon (near the current city of Al-Hillah in Iraq) cut with a snippet of David Grey’s song ‘Babylon’ as the score. The work won the 2011 Publikumspreis (people’s choice prize) in Germany’s Young Art Prize exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburgerbahnhof.
In The Recovery of Discovery, Gaillard notoriously built a pyramid out of 72,000 bottles of beer at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and invited visitors to contribute to the work by drinking it. As Gaillard states:. “The physical hangover is also an architectural one, from which one has to recover.” Gaillard was recently awarded the 2010 Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious award for contemporary visual arts.
Cyprien Gaillard’s talk is presented in collaboration with Emily Carr University and with the gracious support of the Consulat général de France à Vancouver. He is represented by Spruth Magers Gallery, Berlin.
