Michel de broin biography
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At the crossroads of industrial infrastructure and anthropomorphic organic forms, these sculptures reveal our deep entanglement with the systems that sustain modern life. Ranging across a broad spectrum, it opens new perspectives on the multiple technical systems and forms of mediation that affect our lives, often in intangible ways.
Michel de Broin
Biography
Michel Broin lives and works in Montreal, Canada. The historical movement known as “The Age of Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason,” to which Newton belonged, translates to “the Century of Light” in French, light being a synonym of reason and darkness suspected of belonging to witchcraft and magic.
In this work, each element contributes to overall stability, symbolizing the importance of mutual support within any community or system.
Adopting a critical and playful attitude towards common objects and current ideas, he sets out to render visible, through richly profound metaphors and analogies, the forces at work in the movement of the energies which guide our actions and govern our impulses.
Sculpture of Steel, City of Nerves
Bernard Schütze, Espace art actuel
Dendrites, a public artwork recently inaugurated along with its sit — Place de l’Aviation Civile International, is a fascinating and consistent extension of Michel de Broin’s ongoing and prolific art practice.
The artist’s public art piece Révolutions was dedicated in 2003 in Montreal’s Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier. The exhibition will last about a year.
Exhibition curator: Fabrice Bousteau
Opening January 21 at Maison Pommery.
This is a series of bronze sculptures that I like to think of as a collection of portraits – if I’d been a pipeline.
The installation remakes the internal mechanics of door-opening devices found on old metro cars manufactured for the inauguration of the Montréal metro at the 1967 World Exhibition. 15
Featuring Michel de Broin / HR Giger/ Célia Hay / Lina Lapelyte / Robin Leforestier / Le Gentil Garçon / Ella Mievovsky / Catherine Mulligan / Rembrandt / Evelyne Ricord / Sybille Ruppert / Fabien Villon / Banks Violette
Arles, France
2024.10.04
Tensile Body is now installed at the Jing’an Sculpture Park in Shanghai, China.
With many thanks to Yoojin Tang, Jing Cheng, and the entire UCCA Lab team.
Tensile Bodyis a sculpture based on the principle of tensegrity, where seemingly delicate branches are connected in a state of constant tension and compression.
De Broin explores the possible relationships between technological, biological and physical systems. Presented as part of the public sculpture exhibition “Echoes Among Us” at Jing’an Sculpture Park 2024 (Shanghai), this sculpture becomes a metaphor for the cohesion that sustains both natural ecosystems and urban infrastructures, emphasizing the vital role each component plays in the whole.
2024.09.25 – 2024.12.01
I am pleased to announce that my work is part of the exhibition Echoes Among Us at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in China.
Curated by the UCCA Lab for the Shanghai Jing’an International Sculpture Project 2024, the exhibition features works from Lucy Orta & Jorge Orta, Daniel Buren, Cao Shuyi, Michel de Broin, Feng Zhixuan, Marion Verboom, Marc Fornes, Spencer Hansen, Camille Henrot, Tom Claassen, Claudia Comte, Oliver Laric, Pablo Reinoso, Martial Raysse, George Rickey, Liang Hao, Yuri Suzuki, Steve Messam, Patrick Murphy, Paul Morrison, Nabuqi, Shi Hui, Wing Po So, Wang Hua, Wang Lijun, Xia Qiaoyi, Xiang Huidi, Yan Shilin, Yang Mushi, Yu Honglei, Zhang Yibe
TEXTS
Thresholds
Nathalie Bachand, Canada Council for the Arts
Thresholds is an experience in transit.
His art may take many forms, from traditional sculpture to installations, actions, and video, but it always employs a rupture in the logic of a particular convention, whether it is an object, situation, or process.
Between the Possible and the Impossible
Nathalie de Blois, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec
For more than ten years, Michel de Broin has been honing a trans-disciplinary art which calls systems and their articulation into question.
His work consists of deviating and/or corrupting these systems from their original functions (endless staircase, sculpture of a sculpture before unveiling, scribble lined bike path, etc.)
About the artwork
The Anomalies offer reworked copper piping. Disturbing the expectations of industrial systems and their promising efficiency, optimization, and innovation, the artist conceives a different image, one we are not used to rubbing shoulders with on a daily basis.
Perversions, detours, and odd juxtapositions are strategies that repeatedly appear in his work, which uses the combination of unrelated systems in order to expose overlooked preconceptions.
A Logic of Being Against?
Bernard Lamarche, Parachute
Resistance is born of one force’s thwarted affections for another... The artist depicts common objects to distort their expected functions.
It calls to mind the velocity of our urban journeys, small moments in everyday time and space. Take, for instance, his sculpture Révolution, a maquette version of which opened his recent survey exhibition at the MACM. By diverting regular flows into labyrinths of entangled curves, they expose the complexity of our dependence, transforming the efficiency of distribution into a resistance turned in on itself.
Thanks to curator Fabrice Bousteau, Nathalie Vranken, Galerie Trépanier Baer and the entire Pommery Champagnes team.
2024.10.31 – 2025.01.04
Interior and the Collectors, no.
Michel de Broin thus explores systems in their contingency, their potential for failure, and their breaking points, where objects transcend their primary utility to become spaces for poetic and critical speculation.
His work has been exhibited at the Biennale de Lyon, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne; France; the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; the Museum Tinguely, Basel; the Centre d’art Villa Arson, Nice; at Eyebeam, New York; and at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York.