TALK THIERRY GEOFFROY / COLONEL : ULTRA CONTEMPORARY ART
Open and free for all
To mark the release of his monograph, Thierry Geoffroy/ Colonel, A Propulsive Retrospective, published by Villa Stuck Munchen, curators Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou look back over his cheeky career.
The Talk will be followed by a convivial aperitif.
Thierry Geoffroy is an artist of urgency. Using a restricted formal vocabulary of cardboard, photography, tents, newspaper extracts and inventive formats such as Emergency Room, Biennalist and Critical run, he questions the issues at stake in an intensified, everyday present.
War, racism, the refugee crisis, news items and everyday mundane gestures become the subject of collective exhibitions and performances in institutions that are partitioned by outdated classification systems. An enthusiastic hitchhiker, he packs an international network of personalities in his suitcase, creating ephemeral communities like artistic precipitates that are reified in action.
Inspired by advertising, agitprop, junk art, happenings and institutional criticism, his work has an acuity and graphic consistency that serves an emphatic vision of the world.
The cheeky French-Danish artist has fun and provokes disruption in major ceremonies such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale, helping to dislocate the temporalities and infrastructures of art.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE COLONEL
Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel is a French artist who has lived in Copenhagen since 1982 and is known for his ‘emergency art formats’, in particular ‘Emergency Room’, ‘Critical Run’ and ‘Biennalist’. His practice can be described as an artistic response to globalisation. His multifaceted work, which takes the form of photographs, videos, sculptures, tents, paintings, texts and conceptual contracts, has been presented in various art institutions around the world: MoMA PS1 in New York, ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Palazzo Delle Art in Naples and Kunsthalle Mannheim, Villa Stuck Museum among others.
He has also participated in major artistic events such as the Venice Biennale, the Liverpool Biennale, the Manifesta Biennale, the Cairo Biennale and the Casablanca Biennale.
BIOGRAPHY OF PIERRE-ALEXANDRE MATEOS and CHARLES TEYSSOU: CURATORS
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos (1989) and Charles Teyssou (1988) are a duo of curators and writers based in Paris. Current and forthcoming projects include a public programme at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection entitled Paris Orbital; a publication on homosexual cruising with HEAD (Geneva); and the Arles Terminal City archive (arlesterminalcity.com), Fondation LUMA (Arles).
They recently curated Anathemata at Mostyn (Llandudno, Wales) with works by Antonin Artaud, Pierre Guyotat and Sarah Kane; GOREGEOUS, by Darja Bajagić at Confort Moderne (Poitiers) and an exhibition co-curated with Kevin Blinderman devoted to the figure of the dandy Jacques de Bascher at Treize (Paris) and the Kunsthalle in Bern.
In collaboration with Dustin Cauchi and Dasha Zaharova, they launched The Opioid Crisis Lookbook platform in 2020: a publishing and exhibition project infused with narcotic culture. In collaboration with Rasmus Myrup and Octave Perrault, they initiated the Cruising Pavilion, a series of exhibitions dedicated to the links between sexual dissidence, art and architecture that travelled from Venice (16th Architecture Biennale), to New York (Ludlow 38) and Stockholm (ArkDes Museum). They have been editors-in-chief of L'Officiel Art and are regular contributors to Mousse Magazine, Spike, Double Magazine and Cura.
