Pierre Coulibeuf is a French visual artist and filmmaker born in Elbeuf in 1949.
Since 1987, the work of Pierre Coulibeuf has played with interdisciplinarity through experimental fictions taking the form of short and feature-length films shot on 16mm and 35mm film. Drawing inspiration from the Nouveau Roman, performance art, cinema, choreography, architecture and representation modes (35mm projection, video installation, photography) as well, his work focuses on body, gesture, and space as malleable, interdependent elements of his mental visions.
In Pierre Coulibeuf's work, places are never reduced to mere sets: they are the raw material of his films. Similarly, the actors in his fictions are not only actors, but often contemporary artists whose mental worlds inspire Pierre Coulibeuf's imaginary portraits. In other words, these are not filmed performances, but incessant shifts between acting and performance, in a constant blurring of boundaries.
Pierre Coulibeuf's work is cyclical: the principle of metamorphosis and simulacra, as theorized by Pierre Klossowski, plays a predominant role. The worlds of other artists, such as Jan Fabre, Jean-Marc Bustamante and Michelangelo Pistoletto, are transformed by Coulibeuf's visions, developing as a completely independent body of work.
In his work, Pierre Coulibeuf breaks down the categories of art and the genres of cinema. He does not seek to show the production of the artists he features in his films, but constructs his films by staging actions inspired by his own artistic project.
What the artist-director films is his relationship to the work or mental universes of other artists, through fictions in which the distinction between the artist and his production becomes increasingly blurred: by having the artists play their own roles, Pierre Coulibeuf makes them "actors" in another work, but also "ghosts" of their own, within his own work.
Coulibeuf's work, when conceived with the inspiration drawn from another artist, questions the very concept of identity through mental visions that transform both the identity and the work of the other artist.
In most of Coulibeuf's works, the labyrinth is a recurring motif and, in the architecture of his films, a circular narrative punctuated by sequences repeat and fragment the subject. The motif of the labyrinth (particularly present in Dédale and Enigma), with its multiple entrances, where we lose ourselves physically and symbolically, where we retrace our steps and where everything seems the same, illustrates the principle of repetition-variation that runs through Pierre Coulibeuf's entire field of experience.
Films shot on 35mm film are the matrixes of Pierre Coulibeuf's installations : the still image creates the moving image and, reciprocally, the moving image generates still images in the form of photographs. The concept of simulacra, through the constant operation of doubling and even mise en abyme, seems to extend to all of Pierre Coulibeuf's plastic manifestations. His installations, for example, include projections of scenes from his short and feature-length films, which, deconstructed and then reconstructed, become autonomous works. Replayed in the form of loops, these contribute to the labyrinthine dimension that structures the artist's cinema.
In short, Pierre Coulibeuf's work is very much a simulacrum itself, seeing its relation to the worlds from which it can draw inspiration; in creating his images, he achieves a metamorphosis of the various elements that come into play in his films. The concepts of otherness and identity are not opposed in the artist's work: together, they help to give meaning to all his productions, while at the same time pushing back the boundaries of visual representation. Whether in narrative or temporal terms, his works elude linearity.
Pierre Coulibeuf's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad, including :
France (Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, Musée d'Art Roger-Quilliot de Clermond Ferrand, Palais Jacques-Cœur à Bourges, Musée Château d'Annecy), Portugal (Museu Coleção Berardo), Spain (La Casa Encendida), Brazil (Fondation Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Centre d'art Oi Futuro in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro), China (Times Museum in Guangzhou, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chengdu, Yuan Space in Beijing, New Media Art Center of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing), Iceland (Reykjavik Art Museum, Verksmidjan Art Center), Russia (Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, Russian Museum - Marble Palace in St. Petersburg, Pro Arte Foundation), Germany (Deichtorhallen-Haus der Photographie in Hamburg, Galerie der HGB in Leipzig), Poland (Kulczyk Foundation in Poznan), Canada (Saw Gallery in Ottawa), Luxembourg (neimënster). ..
and group exhibitions, notably :
Germany (Haus der Kunst in Munich), Brazil (Musée d'Art du Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre), Austria (Leopold Museum in Vienna), Italy (MAMbo/Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Castello di Barletta, GAM in Turin), Israel (Museum of Contemporary Art in Herzliya), Spain (Reina Sofia in Madrid), Portugal (Museu Coleção Berardo), Switzerland (Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, La Rada in Locarno), Greece (EMST-National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens), Brazil (Itau Cultural, Santander Cultural), France (Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse)
Pierre Coulibeuf has been invited to several biennials abroad, in particular:
10th BIM/Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement, Geneva, Switzerland (2003)
5th Mercosul International Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2005)
1st Ural Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg (2010)
EMOP/European Month of Photography, Luxembourg (2019)
BF22-Biennale of Photography, Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal (2022)
He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including:
Leonard de Vinci grant from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1993)
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2001)
Selected for the Art China Prize, in the category of most influential foreign artists in China (2013)
Winner of the French Institute's Résidences Sur Mesure (2019)
Pierre Coulibeuf's works are part of major collections in France and abroad, including :
Fonds national d'art contemporain/Cnap-Paris; Musée national d'art moderne/Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, France; Sammlung Goetz Munich, Germany; Fondation Iberê Camargo-Porto Alegre, Brazil; Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea/GAM - Turin, Italy ; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein/NBK-Berlin, Germany; Museu Coleção Berardo-Lisbon, Portugal; Museu de Artes do Rio Grande do Sul/MARGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain de Bretagne/FRAC-Rennes, France; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland. ..