Gérard Garouste - A Restless Man

"I'm the son of a bastard who loved me. My father was a furniture dealer who sold off the property of deported Jews. I had to dismantle, word by word, that great fraud with passed for an education. My first episode of delirium happened when I was twenty-eight years old, and others followed. I stay regularly in psychiatric hospital.

To what extent my childhood experiences and my madness are connected remains unclear, however both nip at my heels. For a long time I was just a mass of questions. Today, aged sixty-three, I am not a wise man, I am not cured, I am a painter. And I can pass on what I have come to understand." Gérard Garouste 

Born in 1946 in Paris, Gérard Garouste lives and works in Paris and Normandy. He is one of the leading figures in French art. As both painter and sculptor, he is obsessed by the origins of our culture, myths and the legacy left us by the old masters. His own life is the springboard for his work on ‘dismantling images and words’ and his fascination with the questions of origins, time and transmission. His paintings are born of associations of ideas. Now unsettling, now joyful, they teem with animals, some of them fantastical, and a cast of different characters. His sources range from the Bible to popular culture and literary greats, from Cervantes to Rabelais.