GASPARD LIEB
The artist was born in 1975 in the suburbs of Paris, and lives and works now in Normandy. After studying fundamental physics, he joined the University of Paris-Sorbonne to study philosophy and aesthetics, focusing his research on poetry and then painting. His career has led him to teach philosophy but also to write texts and catalogues for various artists. Essentially self-taught as for his artistic practices, he also attended evening classes at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Rouen. In 2010 he took the name Gaspard Lieb and began to paste light and poetic figures on walls in the city, sometimes accompanied by a title or a sentence. The aim is always to populate the city with yet other human figures and to propose small urban surprises, furtive encounters. What motivates the poster artist or any urban artist is perhaps this desire to reduce the gap between art and life. Above all, it is the desire to find an artistic practice that is part of real life and not one simply behind the drawing board or in the reserved space of the gallery. This in order to offer the passerby images that are often strange, beautiful or "just for fun", but always ephemeral.
"My drawing practice only comes to life when it meets life in the street. Pasting a drawing to a wall finalizes the line. And then all this only makes sense because we share it... It is always a question of producing modest, happy or poetic encounters, to populate our urban drifts, our daily journeys."
In 2015, he took part in the exhibition Flaubert in the City, for which he pasted nearly 200m2 of drawings, accompanied by the writer's texts, in the streets of Rouen and on his campus, offering visitors not only the opportunity to see, but also to read Flaubert in their streets. For Rouen impressionnée in 2016 he had a 6.5m high dancer emerge from the Rouen Conservatory, pasted on an outside wall, in full view of passersby, and reflected in the building's façade. Since then, he has continued to alternate his practice of free pasting with the creation of monumental pasted drawings for institutions, communities or museums... In 2017 he created his largest pasted drawing to date at the Clock-making Museum of Saint Nicolas d'Aliermont, 14 metres of drawn mechanisms and humanity caught up in the wheels of time. In autumn 2019 he responded to the Lubrizol disaster in Rouen with a drawing of a girl wearing a gas mask, while in 2020 he installed The Fall of Icarus at INSA Rouen Normandie. During the recent lockdown due to the COVID crisis he also made use of projections of his drawings.