Lille art fair welcomes Jacques Villeglé as guest of honor for its 5th edition.
As a major French artist in contemporary art born in 1926, he is a founder member of the “New Realist” in 1960, with other artists like Arman, César, Christo and Yves Klein.
His work will be shown through the fair:
- publisher Pasnic will present his books and prints,
- publisher Alain Buyse his screens and posters,
- Véronique Smagghe gallery his drawings and paintings and
- finally, Guy Pieters gallery his sculptures.
Biographical notes
Jacques Villeglé was born in Quimper, Brittany, in 1926 and started to collect found objects in 1947 in Saint-Malo, among other things there were steel wires, discarded from the Atlantic wall… In December 1949 he narrows down his passion for appropriating objects to include only ripped posters. In june 1953, after the publication of Hepérile Éclaté a phonetic poem by Camille Bryen, which was rendered illegible by the lenses in pleated glass made by his intellectual partner Raymond Hains. In February 1954 they met François Dufrêne, a lettriste poet who in turn introduced them to Yves Klein, then Pierre Restany and Jean Tinguely. After their participation to the first Paris Biennale all of them formed in Milan the group called Nouveaux Réalistes.
Before 1958 Villeglé had written his ideas about ripped posters as a theme of Des réalités collectives, after which he was considered the historian of an entity called Lacéré anonyme, created by him in 1959.
In search of the discards of civilization, especially when they are anonymous, he put together since 1969 a socio-political alphabet dedicated to Professeur S. Tchakhotine, the author in 1939 of Le Viol des foules par la propagande.
In 2007, Jacques Villeglé begins working on sculptures following classic paths (bronze, glass) as well as industrials techniques (corten steel, cast iron, polished stainless steel mirror).
After 1957 selected works by Villeglé have been shown in more than 200 personal shows in Europe and America, and he participated to collective exhibits in the five continents. His works have been acquired by the most important museums in Europe and America.
Monographs on the artist have been published by critic and novelist Bernard Lamarche-Vadel (Marval, 1990) and by Odile Felgine (Ides et Calendes, 2001) and (Guy Pieters Gallery, 2007). In 2005, his collected writings were published by Transéditions, Paris, and, translated into German by Nautilus, Hamburg (2007) et selected chapters translated in English by Martin Muller Books (2012).
Since 1988 eight of his nineteen volumes which constitute the whole of his thematic catalog about ripped posters have been published. A volume titled Carrefour politique came out in 1997, on the occasion of the creation of the Atelier d’Aquitaine.
Official website : www.villegle.fr
