This ist the first retrospective dedicated to Michel Journiac’s œuvre, nearly ten years after the artist’s death in October 1995. This will be an occasion to take stock of one of the most remarkable protagonists on the French contemporary art scene of the past four decades, whose work, however, is still not very widely known, ou known only in fragmentary fashion.

Michel Journiac was the seminal figure and main proselyte in France of the “body art“ movement, which was to be one of the last attempts on the part of an artistic movement to question the foundations of society. Yet Journiac‘s intense and multi-facetted oeuvre is not to be limited to this one aspect. He can also be considered as one of the chief initiators of sociological art in the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, and as a forerunner of that which one critic recently termed “relational aesthetics“. His polymorphous oeuvre, which can be parodistic as well as critical, is expressed through such media as sculpture, photography, video, installation using both objects and living presence. Journiac‘s oeuvre means to encompass the totality of human experience: from sexual identity to political representation, via social life with its conditioned patterns of behaviour and family archetypes, even the sacred, violence, organic life, and death.

Journiac resorts to such unusual devices as his own blood, clothing, cross-dressing, branding, the human skeleton, gold, photo-romances, and hijacks everyday objects and practices from their context. Journiac‘s oeuvre amounts to a savage indictment of all that which maims, mutilates and oppresses humanity in its bodily, political and creative consciousness.

To commemorate this exhibition, an exhaustive catalogue will be published in collaboration with the Paris Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts. This will be the first catalogue of this magnitude devoted to Michel Journiac, and will be supervised by Vincent Labaume, with contributions by Emmanuel Guigon, Fabrice Hergott, Julia Hontou, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux and Vincent Labaume, as well as accounts and reminiscences by Jean Daviot, Jacques Donguy, Frederic Lormeau, Marc Martin-Malburet, Catherine Millet, Jean-Luc Moulene, Stefano Polastri, Jacques Rougemont and Rodolphe Stadler.

A series of lectures will complement this exhibition, shedding some light on Michel Journiac‘s creative processes; this will be an invitation to the public to reflect on the use of the body as a tool, an artistic medium and a subject of the artist‘s oeuvre.