Galerie Christophe Gaillard

Pierre Bettencourt was a writer, poet, publisher, butterfly collector, and tireless traveler (to Africa, Oceania, the Far East, India, the United States, Mexico, …). Born in 1917 in Saint-Maurice-d’Ételan, he lived between Normandy, Paris, and Burgundy, where he settled in 1963 with his wife, the writer Monique Apple, and passed away in 2006. He conceived his literary work in Normandy (writing, typography, printing, publishing) and his plastic work in Burgundy (several hundred bas-reliefs) […] After completing his secondary studies in Le Havre and Savoy, Pierre Bettencourt attended Paul Valéry’s poetic course at the Collège de France in Paris between 1936 and 1938 and developed a passion for theater. In 1941, he purchased a hand press. For about twelve years, he published limited editions, in the family home then occupied by the Germans, of his own texts as well as those of Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean Dubuffet. From 1953, Pierre Bettencourt went butterfly hunting with his friend Jean Dubuffet and created his first collages using butterfly wings. He then created his first assemblies composed of various materials collected from nature (bones, flint, fabric, sponge, coffee beans, eggshells, …), presenting disturbing scenes of fantastic divinities depicted in a climate of violent eroticism mixed with the sacred, dedicated to an unknown and barbaric cult, perhaps born from his numerous travels and his passion for vanished civilizations. He created a total of 400 bas-reliefs between 1954 and 1992. Long kept confidential, deliberately withdrawn from artistic circuits or jealously guarded by those who were their custodians, Pierre Bettencourt’s works were exhibited at the René Drouin Gallery, the Daniel Cordier Gallery, then the Beaubourg Gallery, and finally that of Baudouin Lebon in Paris. They are now housed at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Grenoble Museum, the Contemporary Art Center of the Abbey of Auberive, the Abattoirs in Toulouse, and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.

Solo show of Pierre Bettencourt

From May 18th to June 15th, 2024

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From May 16 to June 15, 2024, the Christophe Gaillard Gallery is pleased to present the third exhibition dedicated to the singular work of Marcel Bascoulard. The material of Marcel Bascoulard’s photographs (1913-1978) is composed of dissociated elements: fictitious elements, desires, and active elements made of scenes. Immobile and complex, the formal elements fold back to create a story like no other. The perpetual shift between Bascoulard’s face and body on the small photographic prints confronts us with a deliberate, surprising, intense, and acute experience. As if his body crossed a threshold by becoming a woman. (…). Self-taught, Marcel Bascoulard produced strange full-length self-portraits as early as 1942, in which he staged himself wearing brightly colored dresses that he designed and had made by seamstresses, and holding a broken mirror in his right hand for twenty years. From his early photographs in the old suburbs of Bourges, through those taken in the city during the 1950s, to those outdoors from the mid-1960s, Marcel Bascoulard is a precursor in many ways. He questions the habits and norms to which each of us is assigned from birth. His work anticipates that of Pierre Molinier, Urs Lüthi, or Luciano Castelli… Countless exhibitions have been dedicated to this “magnificent tramp” since the discovery of his troubling photographs forty years after his death. His works were presented in 2018 alongside those of Cindy Sherman in the exhibition Dancing With Myself organized by the Pinault Foundation in Venice at La Punta della Dogana, in 2019 at the Grenoble Museum during the presentation of the Antoine de Galbert Collection, in Arles during the Photo Brut exhibition, and in 2020 at the CAC Brétigny. In 2021, the Folk Art Museum in New York paid tribute to him in the United States by showing a set of his photographs, and starting in late January, the Kunsthalle in Bregenz, Austria, will dedicate a solo exhibition to him. The Christophe Gaillard Gallery has been working for the past two years on the development of the catalogue raisonné of Marcel Bascoulard’s photographic work as well as the publication of an exhaustive monograph.

Solo show of Marcel Bascoulard

From May 18th to June 15th, 2024