Pierre-Marie Brisson

Pierre-Marie Brisson (1955, Orléans, France) is a contemporary artist, an author of paintings, graphic works, and engravings. Resides and works in France. 

Brisson was born and grew up in a family of farmers, not far from Orléans, in the center of France. It was back in his childhood that he began drawing and evinced an interest for archeology, the history of ancient civilizations, and their culture. While travelling across Italy, he developed a special penchant for the art of the Etruscans, an ancient civilization that inhabited the Appenine Peninsula three millennia ago, and that has inspired Brisson’s work since then. 1978 saw Brisson’s first exhibition, held at the Charles Péguy Museum in Orléans, and in 1980 he was exhibited in New York. Starting from 1981, his works were displayed by museums and galleries in France and Germany, Sweden and Japan, Canada and the US, gaining popularity and recognition. Brisson’s work is now in prestigious collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Achenbach, Foundation, (San Francisco); the Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale, the Jewish Museum, (New York); the George Page Museum, (Los Angeles); the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris; the Musée de la Poste, (Paris); the University of San Francisco, and the Pushkin Museum, (Moscow).

Pierre-Marie Brisson’s painting reminds the viewer of ancient murals because of his simplified figures that evoke the protagonists of ancient legends and creatures from myths - while the surface of his works is uneven, covered with creases and crevices, as if touched by time. His careful texturing represents a kind of archeological dig for the artist: he cuts, scratches and pierces the multi-layered surfaces of his canvases to reveal images from within the strata of these materials. Pierre-Marie Brisson’s works bridge contemporaneity and concinnity with antiquity and the olden times. His work has often been compared to Matisse, especially the cutouts, largely due to his relentless exploration of floral motifs and his incredible facility with color. However, Brisson’s work presents a much richer vocabulary, one that is reminiscent of Pompeian murals, engaging the Classical exploration of the body and in modern iterations, investigating the confusion between abstraction and representation.

Brisson has had multiple solo and group exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums, including: Timothy Yarger Fine Art, (Beverly Hills); Musée de L'Hospice St. Roch, (Issoudun, France); Musée de Cognac, (France); Galerie Fabrice Galvani, (Toulouse, France); Franklin Bowles Galleries, (New York-San Francisco); Musée des Beaux-Arts – Gaillac, (France); Musée Faure, (Aix-les-Bains, France); Art-Paris, Galerie Frédéric Storme, (Lille, France); Carré Sainte-Anne Espace d'Art Contemporain, (Montpellier, France); Miami Art+Design (MA+D) international Fair, Shchukin Gallery, (USA); and, more recently, had a solo retrospective at Shchukin Gallery, Paris entitled “An Overview, 1989-2015.”