MATHIEU MERCIER

Taking his visual cues from the three-dimensional celestial maps known as armillary spheres, this award-winning Paris sculptor re-contextualizes the Harcourt glass as the center of a solar system of color and light.

"The sparkle of glass, its reflections, and its many transparent geometrics inspired a wave of circles mounted with colored glass beads."

A talented painter, sculptor, architect and director, Mathieu Mercier is known for taking objects intended for basic mass consumption and presenting them in new artistic, art-historical and aesthetic contexts. In this way, his work seeks to identify and reveal the place of beauty in the stuff of everyday life. Ultimately, his art imbues these objects with new meanings, allowing the viewer to consider multiple readings for them. 

For his projects, he has received the coveted Marcel Duchamp Prize, presented in partnership with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which exhibited his work shortly before he won the award in 2003. His works have also been shown in the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Nuremberg Kunsthalle, in Germany, among other prestigious institutions—with gallery representation in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina, Mexico and France. 

Mercier was born in 1970 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a Parisian suburb northwest of the city. He graduated from L’École Nationale Superieure d’Art de Bourges, and L’Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, in Paris where he now lives and works.