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Galerie frank elbaz is pleased to announce passage (à la ligne), Bernard Piffaretti’s fourth solo show at the gallery, after bande-annonce, Montage (2011) and re-marquable (2014). The exhibition will run from 20 October to 24 December 2016.

For Piffaretti, the title usually functions as a kind of opening credit and passage (à la ligne) is no different. A painting from 1982, from the series Paradigme - Peinture du doute, 1982-1983, in which the central axis slowly takes shape, is a case in point. A large painting from 1999 is placed in between paintings from 2016, a brief punctuation, which shows that the passage in question is also a continuum. The past always remains unfinished, turning the present into a future memory. Bernard Piffaretti’s last solo exhibitions, No Chronology at Klemm’s in Berlin in 2016 and Moving Pictures at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles in 2015, all followed the leitmotif of the passage, transforming the viewers themselves into cultural mediators.

The gallery is also extremely pleased to announce the publication of two monographs that retrace Bernard Piffaretti’s artistic career since the early 1980s. The first book is published by Karma New York, in collaboration with the galleries frank elbaz, Cherry and Martin, and Klemm’s. The publication of the second work, entitled 1980-2016 - Catalogue raisonnable, was made possible by Mamco in Geneva, with the help of the aforementioned galleries, the CNAP (publication subsidy scheme) and the FRAC Franche-Comté.

At the opening on 20 October 2016, galerie frank elbaz will host a book signing with the artist. Echoing the title of the exhibition, Bernard Piffaretti will create 50 offprints (in single copies) from the book published by Karma.

Bernard Piffaretti was born in Saint-Etienne, France. He lives and works in Paris. After training as an artist at the École des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Etienne, from 1974 until 1979, he developed a technique that underlies the creation of every one of his canvasses, the so-called “duplication method”. In 2015 he had solo exhibitions at the FRAC Franche-Comté in Besançon and at the Hangar à bananes of the Fine Arts Museum of Nantes in cooperation with Martin Barré, at the Saint-Etienne Museum of Modern Art and the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in 2009, at the Mamco in Geneva, and the CRAC de Sète, France, in 2007, at Cheim and Read in New York in 2002, at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi, Belgium, in 2001, and at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2000. The artist has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, the Hong Kong Museum, the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern. As shown in Mamco’s publication 1980-2016 - Catalogue raisonnable, his work can be found in many international public and private collections.