Edition 94 pages
Published on the occasion of Gregory Forstner’s exhibition ‘Four Legs Good, Twi Legs Better’ for the Rencontres de l’Art Contemporain in Cahors
21,5 x 15,5 cm

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Born in 1975, he lives in France and works between the United States, France and Germany.
Gregory Forstner was born in Douala, Cameroon, to a French mother and an Austrian father. He interrupts his secondary studies and decides to study at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and then at the Villa Arson in Nice. He then worked in Nice for several years.
In 2008, he received a grant from the French Ministry of Culture for a one-year residency in New York. He settled there with his family.

The subjects of his paintings are drawn from art history, popular culture and his personal mythology.

“Borrowing his subjects from the most diverse iconographic sources, his compositions immediately strike by their visual impact. His universe, where laughter is never far from fright, where references to the great masters of the past and borrowings from illustrations of all kinds intersect, depicts a grotesque, worried and cruel humanity. But, to do this, the artist uses the subterfuges of the mask, the disguise, the transposition, and the most frightening scenes often take on the appearance of festivals, massacres, the appearance of fairs or carnivals. Painted with broad brushstrokes, with an ardor that sometimes borders on a sort of destructive rage, these images are nonetheless “beautiful pieces of painting”. And it is ultimately the pictorial mastery that impresses the most here, as much by its chromatic fulgurances, as by an implacable power of the touch. Power is, in fact, the word that immediately comes to mind to describe these paintings whose expressive force remains long in memory.
Extract from the press release of the Grenoble Museum