Pierre Bismuth, Abstractions sur le thème des nations

For over thirty years, Pierre Bismuth’s work has explored the status of the artist and artistic production, which have been gradually absorbed into the leisure and entertainment industry. In so doing, Bismuth manipulates the techniques and expertise of creation in order to better break free of them. By adopting the codes of conceptual art and, more particularly, of appropriation, he makes use of extracts from films, images and works by other artists. This is why his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou was titled “Tout le monde est artiste mais seul l’artiste le sait”. In 2016 he produced Where Is Rocky II, his first feature film, after having co-written the script of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004.

He began his work on flags – the principle of which is to create new national emblems by merging the emblems of two different countries – in 2019 with the series “Abstractions”, the combinations of which were determined by data relating to migration flows towards Europe. The project has since evolved with Variations sur le thème des nations, followed by Abstractions sur le thème des nations. Both are based on data – political, economic or social, past or present – as in this series inspired by statistics on international trade, created specifically for the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco for the exhibition “Tremblements, acquisitions récente du NMNM”.

The resulting compositions have become pictorial objects in their own right that simultaneously arouse a history of 20th-century art and a feeling of both strangeness and familiarity.