Born in 1965 in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and based in Marseille for over thirty years, Gilles Barbier has been developing a singular body of work since the 1990s, combining sculpture, drawing, painting, and writing. Rejecting the traditional categories of contemporary art, his practice unfolds through series and explorations, questioning our relationship to the body, to language, to memory, and to the ways we inhabit the world.
The exhibition Habiter (Inhabiting) by Gilles Barbier brings together around forty works. While many of them were produced specifically for the occasion, the exhibition also includes earlier pieces, the oldest dating back to 1992. Certain series, such as Les Pions and Habiter la Peinture, have accompanied the artist since his early years and form the backbone of his practice. Other, more recent bodies of work—Habiter la Viande, Stasis, Naufrages—shed new light on these initial gestures, amplifying them or shifting their focus.
Without claiming to be a retrospective, the exhibition nonetheless brings to the fore a motif that has run through Gilles Barbier’s work for over thirty years, yet had never before been articulated so clearly: that of inhabiting. The exhibition thus reveals the underlying coherence of a body of work which, through highly diverse forms, has long explored the ways we occupy the world.
This exhibition is part of a broader Marseille-based program dedicated to Gilles Barbier, presented simultaneously across several venues in the city.
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