Jean-Pascal Flavien
Jean-Pascal Flavien was born in 1971 in Le Mans, France. He studied Fine Arts in Rennes, France, Italy and at the University of California, Los Angeles. The artist lives and works in Berlin.
Jean-Pascal Flavien’s practice combines elements from architecture, sculpture, and the performative, to create works that are both precise and concrete but also poetic and evocative. The models of houses, for example, are generated from settings imposed by the artist. Like preliminary sketches of large-scale paintings, his models for houses are maquettes for possible scenarios and perhaps views from the past or future of these fictional buildings. His altered domestic objects, such chairs, tables, outlets or blinds draw attention to the way in which design and architecture shape our experience of space but also how they can more fundamentally determine our experience of ourselves and of others.
Flavien’s recent solo exhibitions include: Greenhouse, Fabre, Paris (2019); house with things behind, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2018); protocols, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2017); dancers sleeping inside a building, Les Ateliers de Rennes – Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Musée de la Danse, Rennes (2016); folding house (to be continued), NMNM – Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2016); folding house, NMNM – Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2015); statement house (temporary title), RCA, London (2015); Cinonema, no drama cinema, South London Gallery, London (2012); breathing house, la maison respire,Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’art contemporain, Pougues-les-Eaux (2012); Jean-Pascal Flavien, Kunstverein, Langenhagen (2012), and PLAY, HEDAH/Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2011).
Selected group exhibitions include: MANCHE TRUGEN FEDERN, Grzegorzki Productions, Berlin (2022); HOW TO SURVIVE – art as a survival strategy, Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2020); Prehistory, a modern enigma, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); There Is Fiction in the Space Between, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2019); space edits (the trouble with language), Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2018); The Way We Perform Now, Ujazdowski Castle–Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2017); Meeting Points 8, Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2017); Variable Dimensions – artists and architecture, MAAT, Lisbon (2017); The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, The James Gallery, New York (2016); Jump, CAC Brétigny – Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2016); L’Esprit du Bauhaus, Musée Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris (2016); De toi à la surface, Le Plateau – FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris (2016); La collection des objets que l’on utilise sans les toucher, CNEAI, Chatou (2015); All that falls, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014), and Was Modelle können, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2014).
The life-sized project folding house (to be continued) was acquired for the collection of the NMNM Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and inaugurated in July 2016 on the museum’s outside terrace.