Pierrick Sorin

The Pierrick Sorin exhibition, initially scheduled to run until 15 December, has been extended until 29 January 2024.

As a prelude to the Fernand Léger and the Cinema exhibition, which will be held in 2022 at the Fernand Léger National Museum, we propose an exploration of the fertile relationship between painting and moving images, by inviting a major figure of contemporary creation in France: Pierrick Sorin. 

Born in Nantes in 1960, Pierrick Sorin is a video artist and director. In his videos, inspired by burlesque cinema and the poetic universes of Georges Méliès and Jacques Tati, he plays a clownish character who questions the meaning of our daily lives with humour and irony.

From 1995 onwards, the artist invented "optical theatres" using home-made processes, in which a virtual hologram - a miniature double of Pierrick Sorin - performs comic sketches in a set composed of a cobbled-together assembly of real and fictitious objects: "I admit that the simple visual magic in which I willingly wallow in creating optical theatres fascinates me and brings me closer to the inventor of yesteryear".

For the Fernand Léger National Museum, Pierrick Sorin will propose the creation of new works: with mischief, the artist will integrate the visitor into his visual pranks while paying tribute to the modernity and aesthetic inventiveness of the pioneering work of one of the main masters of the 20th century avant-garde, Fernand Léger (1881-1955).

Visual: Pierrick Sorin, Self-portrait as a painter, 2019. Commissioned photograph for Air France magazine. Pierrick Sorin © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.