From 16 January to 27 February 2021 the Galerie Christophe Gaillard is particularly delighted to present Marcel Bascoulard’s second solo exhibition. On this occasion, the gallery will reveal for the first time to the public a selection of around twenty photographs, all of great rarity, brought together over the last five years.
A self-taught artist, from 1942 onwards Marcel Bascoulard created strange full-length self-portraits in which he stages himself wearing the flamboyant dresses he designed himself and had made by dressmakers, and holding, for twenty years, a broken mirror in his right hand. From his first photographs in the old neighbourhood of Bourges, to those taken in the city in the fifties, through to the ones outdoors from the mid-sixties, Marcel Bascoulard is a precursor in my respects. He questions the habitus and norms that each of us is assigned to from birth. His corpus announces that of Pierre Molinier, Urs Lüthi, or Luciano Castelli…
There have now been countless exhibitions dedicated to this “magnificent tramp” since the discovery of his unsettling photographs forty years after his death. His works were thus presented in 2018 alongside those of Cindy Sherman in the exhibition Dancing With Myself organised by the Pinault Foundation in Venice at La Punta della Dogana, in 2019 at the Musée de Grenoble during the presentation of the Antoine de Galbert Collection, in Arles during the Photo Brut exhibition, and again in 2020 at the CAC Brétigny. This year, it will be the Folk Art Museum of New York that pay tributes to him in the United States by showing a series of his photographs then, as of next week, the Kunsthalle in Bregenz, Austria, is devoting a solo exhibition to his work.
The Galerie Christophe Gaillard has also been working for two years on the development of the catalogue raisonné of the photographic work of Marcel Bascoulard as well as on the publication of an exhaustive monograph.
