Drum & Bass: Mathieu Mercier
Past Exhibitions exhibition
Overview
The title of the series, Drum & Bass, is a reminder of the series Boogie Woogie, directed by Piet Mondrian in New York, combining the grid of urbanism with the rhythm of music.
The series Drum & Bass echoes an earlier set of works by Mathieu Mercier titled Still Untitled. These pieces, made from boards found in the street and covered with adhesive, present a more or less open interpretation of a mondrianesque grid. The goal is, through the use of scraps, to make a fin de siècle statement on concepts of modernity developed by the avant-gardes.
Reflecting this pattern, the Drum & Bass series offers an assembly of red, yellow and blue industrial objects arranged on a composition of standard black racks.
The concept behind the series was born in New York in 2002, during a stay intended for the preparation of an exhibition. Spending more time discovering the city than working, an instant idea appeared to Mercier within the enormous surface of consumption that is Manhattan today. The artist naturally compared the object's newly acquired symbolic place which was previously occupied by architecture.
The title of the series, Drum & Bass, is a reminder of the series Boogie Woogie, directed by Piet Mondrian in New York, combining the grid of urbanism with the rhythm of music. Titling his artworks with the name of a musical genre that he likes, Mercier reinforces a parallel that can be established between the practice of a DJ and the assembly of pre-existing objects.
This series also develops a recurring element in Mercier's work, that of the object turning into abstraction.
Finally, Drum & Bass allows Mercier to bring together two institutions, the museum and the supermarket, with the ambition to reach a total art form where the function and the symbol are united.
Having intensively worked on the series between 2002 and 2005, Mercier continues to imagine new structures depending on the objects colored in primary colors that he encounters to this day.
After a text by Mathieu Mercier published in L'Officiel Art, n°4, January 2013
Installation Views
Works
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Mathieu Mercierd&b - D.C. FIX, 2002-2019mixed media50 x 52.5 x 16 cm
19 10/16 x 20 10/16 x 6 4/16 in -
Mathieu Mercierd&b MP, 2002-2019mixed media100 x 91.7 x 29 cm
39 5/16 x 36 1/16 x 11 6/16 in -
Mathieu MercierThe King, His Lover and Their Bastard (#2), 2016maple walnut40 x 40 x 4 cm
15 11/16 x 15 11/16 x 1 9/16 in
40 x 40 x 4 cm
32 x 32 x 4 cm
24x 24 x 4 cm -
Mathieu MercierDiptyque XL, 2019acrylic on canvas240 x 200 cm
94 7/16 x 78 11/16 in
2 x 240 x 200 cm -
Mathieu MercierSans titre, 2003-2015masque de baseball acier38 x 30.4 x 30.4 cm
14 15/16 x 11 15/16 x 11 15/16 in
Media
