Laurent Le Deunff’s sculptures often mislead the eye due to the disparity between the materials used and the objects represented. He has a pronounced taste for traditional techniques from the world of arts and crafts as well as decorative artifices. The modesty of papier-mâché and fingernail clippings rubs shoulders with the nobility of bronze and deer antlers, and the rarity of fossilized dinosaur droppings sits side-by-side with the ordinariness of fake wood made from cement. Le Deunff’s meticulousness and acute sense of observation have also been deployed in his series of drawings—copulating animals, the footprints of imaginary monsters or artist’s cats—through which he explores animality, in a narrative that leaves plenty of space for the imagination. His bestiary brings together a wide variety of creatures—dolphins, slugs, seahorses or bears—without any hint of hierarchy of species. Humans are not excluded from the narrative, which reactivates a kind of archetypal primitivism: a prehistoric phallus and various totems and talismans transport civilization back to its most splendid origins.
Laurent Le Deunff's works have recently been exhibited at Pianobi, Rome (IT), at LUGA Luxembourg Urban Garden (LUX), at GAMEC, Bergamo (IT), at the Gherdëina Biennale, Val Gardena, Dolomites (IT), at Le Portique, Le Havre (FR), at the MASC, Sables d'Olonne (FR), at the MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), at La Halle des Bouchers, Vienne (FR), at the Carré Scène nationale, Château-Gontier (FR), at Artspace Boan, Seoul (KR), at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (NL), at PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (IT), at LAMAG, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles (US), at MOCO, Montpellier (FR), at the Musée d’Art Moderne Paris (FR) and in numerous FRACs. His works feature in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (FR), the Fonds d’art contemporain - Paris Collection (FR), the MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), the CAPC, Bordeaux (FR), and in the collections of the FRACs in Paris, Bordeaux, Limoges and Caen (FR).
Born in 1977 in Talence (FR)
Lives and works between Bordeaux and Paris
laurentledeunff@gmail.com
Laurent Le Deunff is represented by Semiose (Paris).
CV
design: Jean-Philippe Bretin