Cypress, 2018
b. 1986 in Brest, France
Lives and works in Paris, France
Jean-Marie Appriou was born in 1986 in Brest, France, and lives and works in Paris, France. Appriou graduated from École régionale des beaux-arts de Rennes in 2010.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s sculptures evoke archaic forms and are inspired by contemporary but also mythological and futuristic worlds. His works are often crafted from aluminum and bronze, the design possibilities of which the artist furthers through experimentation with finishes and in combination with other materials, including blown glass. By alluding to familiar forms, be they animal or human, and developing his unique, almost alchemical approach to his source material, Appriou has created his very own mythology.
Appriou’s work has been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, as the inaugural artist in Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Open Space program, which invites artists to create site-specific projects to appear within the Fondation’s Frank Gehry designed building in Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; the Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Consortium Museum, Dijon; The Villa Medici, Roma, the Biennale de Lyon and the 7th Jing'an International Sculpture Project, Shanghai.
In 2019 he was invited by the Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park in New York, at the Château de Versailles and at the Vienna Biennale. In 2023, he was chosen by Donatien Grau to engrave a copper plate and produce an etching, La Constellation du Louvre, 2023 that entered the Musée du Louvre collection.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s work is part of the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; the Musée du Louvre collection; Borros Collection, Berlin; Fondation Pinault, Venice; Long Museum, Shanghai; Museo Jumex, Mexico City and Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, among others.
Jean-Marie Appriou has presented several outdoor public commissions, including a set of camel works for Art Basel in Miami Beach (2016); Grotto (2018), a set of sculptures presented at the Tuileries Garden for FIAC Paris 2019; Noses (2018), a permanent installation in Zurich‘s Maagplatz; and The Horses (2020), a suite of three surreal equestrian sculptures commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund for Central Park.