Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is very pleased to announce Jules de Balincourt's first solo show at the gallery showcasing new paintings by the French, Brooklyn-based artist.
Escaping any easy categorization, Balincourt's work can be at once figurative and abstract, narrative and dream-like, down-to-earth and mysterious.
Heavily influenced by American culture, Balincourt has often depicted the contradictory facets of the United States' social, political and economic landscapes. In some of the works, the artist clearly addresses us with simple painted phrases, such as Your Technology Fails Me, or sends us a message to Coexist. For Balincourt, "the text serves as a grounding element in which the purely formal attributes [of the abstract paintings] are negated, creating a sort of visual and logical conflict or resolution."
In other works, he appeals to our yearning to escape, either to exotic, tropical beach settings, or through the image of Clint Eastwood as the lone cowboy in a Western movie. Balincourt's universe is built out of powerful imagery, in vibrant colors, often depicting scenarios of urban or social utopias.
Jules de Balincourt was born in 1972 in Paris and moved to the United States in the early 1980s. After obtaining his BFA in 1998 from the California College of Arts in San Francisco, he moved to the East coast and graduated from Hunter College in 2004 with Masters degree in Fine Arts Master.
He has participated in several important group shows, such as Greater New York held at PS1/MoMA (2005); Notre histoire… at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2006); Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (2007) and USA TODAY at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007). He also participated in a group show entitled Down by Law as part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial in New York. His works are included in public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto in Italy, among others.
