Jean-Luc Moulène
— The Arts Club, London 30 January — 21 April 2013

Jean Luc Moulène is one of the most radical and respected artists of his generation. Recognized for his meticulous approach and eclectic creative output, he moves fluidly between three-dimensional work, photography, drawing, and printed matter. His career cannot be easily divided into periods or a single narrative but rather can be conceived, as he has said, as “one continuous performance” in which the reality of his surroundings are collected, rearranged, and reframed. 

Moulène deftly examines the moment when an object is so pushed out of its ordinary context that it verges on either being no longer itself or upturning its own definition. The monochrome works in our Arts Club show, for example, are executed in BIC pen ink – black, blue, green and red – applied by a flat knife, playing both with the idea of ‘paintings’, which they most resemble, and value since a BIC pen is one of the cheapest and most ubiquitous writing tools around. An homage to standardised industrial production, they also acknowledge the more obvious artistic precedents of Yves Klein, Robert Ryman, Alighiero Boetti and recent preoccupations with abstraction in photography.  

Jean-Luc Moulène was born in Reims in 1955. He studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne University where he was awarded a doctorate. He has shown widely internationally, including recent solo shows at Dia Beacon, NY, Modern Art Oxford, Le Carré d’Art, Nimes, Le Musée du Louvre, Paris. An exhibition in two parts is currently on at Thomas Dane Gallery. 

A comprehensive monograph has just been published by the Dia Art Foundation in association with Yale University Press with essays by Director Philippe Vergne and curator Yasmil Raymond. This will be launched at the Thomas Dane Gallery on 12 February.

The exhibition is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes.