RENCONTRE│ GÉRARD ZLOTYKAMIEN

The Bookshop is delighted to welcome Gérard Zlotykamien on Sunday 5th June from 3pm to 5pm for a signing session of his monograph in collaboration with the MATHGOTH gallery.

“Zloty, as he is affectionately called by all those who know him, is an illustrious unknown, or rather an illustrious unknown. He is without doubt the best kept secret on a scene whose actors nevertheless pronounce his name constantly when it comes to quoting their sources.” And if his name is not as well known as those of Jr, Banksy or Invader, Gérard Zlotykamien, a French visual artist born in 1940, is the true pioneer of this artistic movement that is urban art. The first artist to intervene in the street illegally, he drew his first Ephemera, evanescent silhouettes, between masks and ghosts, in 1963 and has never stopped painting on walls or bulky objects (mattresses, doors, windows, suitcases, etc.). These figures bear witness to human stupidity: the European and Asian tragedies of the Second World War, terrorism, climatic catastrophes, etc. With this first monograph, retracing more than sixty years of creation, we discover the influence, the importance and the coherence of Gérard Zlotykamien’s work. A work that never ceases to remind us of the interrupted existence of innocent people and, more globally, of the ephemerality of human existence.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This first monograph devoted to Gérard Zlotykamien features an English translation of the texts by Stéphanie Lemoine. The book contains the testimonies of several personalities who worked with the artist throughout his career. It includes testimonies from Miss Tic, agnès b., Invader, Blek le Rat, Jef Aérosol, Jean Faucheur, Denys Riout, André, Jérôme Mesnager and Hugo Vitrani.

THE AUTHOR

Stéphanie Lemoine is a journalist and author, specialising in urban art. She has published several books on the subject, including In Situ (Paris, Éditions Alternatives, 2005), Artivisme (Paris, Éditions Alternatives, 2010) and L’art urbain, du graffi ti au street art (Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Découvertes”, 2012, reed. 2021). She also contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition Conquête urbaine. Street art au musée, published by Lienart in 2019 and co-published with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais

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