Cyprien Gaillard

Born in 1980 in Paris, he lives there.

Somewhere between vandalism and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and land art, Cyprien Gaillard’s work revisits the “poetics of ruins” dear to Diderot, reworks the aesthetic category of the sublime, seeks out places with a new picturesqueness, and envisages modern architecture, from suburban low-rise blocks to the German bunkers of the Second World War, as archaeological vestiges of the present, like so many ruins in the offing.

Unpublished in France, his video Pruitt-Igoe falls revives the pictorial tradition of Hubert Robert's or Caspar David Friedrich's paintings of ruins, and shows the demolition of a block of flats superimposed on the spectacle of a large waterfall.