Erik Desmazières - Captive Sphere - Etching And Aquatint - 2010 - Cabinet Of Curiosities

Érik Desmazières was born in Rabat in 1948. After a childhood and adolescence spent wandering between Morocco, France and Portugal, he entered the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris. The year he graduated, in 1971, he decided to pursue an artistic career. Having always drawn since childhood, he took evening classes at the City of Paris, studying drawing and engraving with Jean Delpech.

In 1972, he chose engraving as his profession and main means of expression, encouraged by the engraver Philippe Mohlitz and the New York gallery owner Andrew Fitch, who is now undertaking the publication of his engraved work. Recognition in the artistic sector was rapid for Érik Desmazières, who received the Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris in 1978. His work includes, after forty years of activity, more than two hundred plates.

Numerous solo exhibitions of his works have taken place in Europe, the United States and Japan, including retrospectives at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam in 2004, at the Carnavalet Museum in 2006, "Paris à grands traits", at the Jenish Museum in Vevey in 2007: "Les lieux imaginaires d'Erik Desmazières". Present in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library, the works of Erik Desmazières combine technical virtuosity and dreamlike vision in an unprecedented way.

A virtuoso of drawing, a meticulous engraver, creator of dizzying images, an iconographer of Borges among others, Érik Desmazières is an atypical figure in contemporary art as much by his techniques, etching and aquatint, as by the themes and sources he favors. The mysterious world of Érik Desmazières is inhabited in turn by interior scenes deserted by their inhabitants, by naturalist plates detailing crabs and shells in the spirit of old cabinets of curiosities, by flying machines worthy of Leonardo da Vinci, by anamorphic Parisian passages or by teeming architectures where the posterity of a Hieronymus Bosch or a Piranesi is affirmed. Erik Desmazières is a Knight of the Legion of Honor, Officer of the National Order of Merit, Knight of the Academic Palms and Officer of Arts and Letters. (site of the Academy of Fine Arts)

image 32.4 x 23.7 cm sheet 43.2 x 34.0 cm