Absalon

Absalon's sculptures are often seen as a reduced version of the utopian aspirations of modern architecture. His "Cells", constructions intended to shelter the artist during his travels, can evoke monastic cells made by the artist according to the size of his body and his mental space. These refuges offer the possibility of a protest while revealing an obsession with order and thoroughness, as well as the world of De Stijl and the Bauhaus.

Absalon, whose real name is Meir Eshel, arrived in Paris in 1987, when he decided to take on this new identity. He died there at the age of 29 only after a short and dazzling career. With Christian Boltanski, Fabrice Hybert and Didier Marcel in particular, he fixed his artistic vocabulary. In 1990, he explained that his work "consists in arranging objects and giving them the ideal forms so that this is possible". He names these assemblies Housing proposals, Proposals for everyday objects, Disposition, Prototypes, Cells, usual and movable objects which he places on trays, shelves or boxes and which he covers in the same color in order to homogenize them.

During his brief artistic itinerary, Absalon exhibited in important institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1991) and participated in DOCUMENTA IX (1992). The Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris (1993) and the Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2010) have devoted large solo exhibitions to his work. One of his pieces appeared in Punta della Dogana, in the exhibition "Accrochage" (2016).