Biography
A few decades ahead of what is now coined as “street art”, Ernest Pignon-Ernest led an adventure like no other, bringing together technical mastery, existential probity, and the ability to “poetically inhabit the world”. His career has achieved the rare feat of reconciling ethics with a singular, demanding and innovative expression. So much so that some of his images (of those shot during the Paris Commune and of his vagabond Rimbaud in particular), reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies, have become veritable icons of modern times.
From Chile to Soweto, from Algiers to Naples, from Mahmoud Darwich’s Palestine to the beach in Ostia, where Pasolini was murdered, from abortion to exclusion, from AIDS to immigration, for Pignon-Ernest, confronting the dramas of our time and exploring individual destinies estranged from the norm or from myths, means taking a new risk every time – the same risk that haunted Rimbaud when he strove to “find the place and the formula”.
In 2021, Ernest Pignon-Ernest was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Venice presented “Je suis un autre”, a large exhibition bringing together his portraits of poets.
Since his first solo exhibition in 1979 at the ARC – Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Pignon-Ernest’s works have been exhibited in museums and institutions including the Palais des Papes, Avignon; la Biennale di Venezia, Italy; the National Art Museum of China (Beijing); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille; MAMAC, Nice; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; and the Fonds H&E Leclerc, Landerneau, France.
Amongst Pignon-Ernest’s best known urban interventions are: La Commune, Paris, 1971; Maïakovski, Avignon, 1972; Rimbaud, from Paris to Charleville-Mézières, 1978; Boccacio, Certaldo, Tuscany, 1980; Pablo Neruda, Chile, 1980-1981; Naples, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995; Derrière la vitre, Lyon-Paris, 1996; Antoine Artaud, Hôpital Charles Foix, Ivry-sur-Seine, 1997; Robert Desnos / Louise Lame / Gérard de Nerval, Paris, 2001-2002; Durban, Soweto, South Africa, 2001-2002; Maurice Audin, Alger, 2003; Jean Genet, Brest, 2006 ; Les Mystiques, Avignon, 2007; Parcours Mahmoud Darwich, Palestine (Ramallah, Naplouse, Gaza), 2009; Prison Saint-Paul, Lyon, 2012; Pasolini, Rome, Matera, Ostie, 2015; Victor Segalen, Fond H&E Leclerc pour la culture, Landerneau, 2022.
