From September 18 to November 6, 2021

Finissage on Sunday, November 7 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Finissage on November 7 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm, as part of the event Un Dimanche à la Galerie, organized by the Comité professionnel des galeries d’art.

Eva Vautier Gallery is pleased to present Gregory Forstner’s exhibition ‘Lollipop’ (second exhibition at the gallery after La Fiancée du Collectionneur in 2015). As a continuation of his exhibition at the FRAC Occitanie in Montpellier and in parallel to his retrospective exhibition at the Suquet des artistes in Cannes, we present here unpublished works realized since last year.

During this particularly singular temporality that we experienced collectively, Gregory Forstner surprised himself by renewing his vocabulary. For the first time, the figure has been present since the beginning of his career and his studies at the Villa Arson. The artist focuses on the bouquet motif already featured in 2019 in ‘Flowers for the Bold’. For a year, he has been producing a set of still lifes which would be as many possible vanities, considerations on this collective temporality.

Lollipop’, beyond its most immediate evocation, is a scientific experiment conducted by Melvin Calvin and Andy Benson to illuminate a culture of green algae by white light. In doing so, Calvin’s group shows that sunlight acts on chlorophyll in a plant to fuel the construction of organic compounds.

As in the scientific experiment, there is in this work of painting and drawing as the attempt to resort to elementary, primitive gestures, the experience of a regeneration from ‘almost nothing’ and of which only the need of life, desire and pleasure would be the vehicle. The use of this elementary motif allows Gregory Forstner to activate this emotional charge that has been held back until now in the real. Here, the notions of surface, verticality and horizontality, ergonomics, gravity, body and centrality – of physicality – are found as much in the artist’s account of his experience of swimming in open water as in his experience of painting.