Gérard Schlosser

Gérard Schlosser was born on 12 June 1931 in Lille. A student at the Ecole des Arts Appliqués in Paris, where he studied goldsmithing, he briefly attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts before deciding to devote himself to painting in 1953 after attending a performance of ‘Waiting for Godot’. From his earliest canvases, Gérard Schlosser opted for figuration: fragments of bodies painted in solid colours and outlined in black. These works are reminiscent of the work of Pop Art artists. From 1967 onwards, he systematically smeared his canvases with sand, which gave the coloured surfaces a very special vibrancy: each small grain added the depth of its own shape, with its own share of shadow and light. Gérard Schlosser is a painter of fragmented choices. From the 1970s onwards, he used photography and the photomontage technique to create his paintings, cutting together two or three elements from different documents. He later systematised this process, as did other French artists associated with Figuration Narrative: Monory, Rancillac, Aillaud and Fromanger, with whom he took part in the exhibition Mythologies quotidiennes 2 in 1977. The use of the episcope to project an image onto the surface of the canvas became widespread.