BLAIS, Jean-Charles (Nantes, 1956)Jean-Charles Blais

Jean Charles Blais, an artist close to the Nouveaux Réalistes, Pop Art and Arte Povera movements, started exhibiting in the early 1980s, with paintings made from recycled materials and torn posters. His first solo exhibition, at the CAPC in Bordeaux in 1982, was followed by numerous presentations in the galleries Yvon Lambert in Paris, Leo Castelli in New York, Buchmann in Basel and Kenji Taki in Tokyo. In 1987, a solo exhibition was dedicated to him at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. This was followed in the 1990s by a number of important realisations, such as the decoration of the Assemblée nationale metro station in Paris in 1990, consisting of a gigantic frieze of printed posters that were periodically renewed (renewed in a new version in 2004 for ten years). The following year he was invited to present a solo exhibition at the Staatsgalerie Morderner Kunst in Munich and in 1994 at the Hague Museum. In 1996 he realised a public project 'The Telephone Booths' consisting of posters displayed in the advertising spaces of telephone booths in the city at the request of the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of the exhibition 'Thinking Press'. In 1998, he exhibited in Paris, at the Yvon Lambert Gallery, then at the Groninger Museum and the Bawag Foundation in Vienna, a series of works entitled 'Su misura', which he had made from fabric in a fashion atelier.