The rising sculptor Julien Creuzet to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Earlier this week, Estonia disclosed that Edith Karlson would design its pavilion for the upcoming edition of the largest art festival in the world, whose 2022 edition has recently concluded.
Creuzet was raised in Martinique but was born in Le Blanc Mesnil, France. He describes his work as an effort to navigate the complexities of his French-Caribbean identity. He currently resides in the Paris district of Montreuil. Creuzet frequently creates tangles of metal, plastic, and rope accompanied by protracted titles that reference Caribbean migrations. He frequently finds the materials he uses, and they remind him of trash that washes up on the shore.
A French-Caribbean artist has never before represented the French Pavilion. His pavilion replaces Zineb Sedira, who represented France as the first artist of Algerian heritage and whose pavilion won a special mention from the Venice Biennale jury in 2022.
Together, the two pavilions represent a change in focus for the French Pavilion, one of the Biennale’s most well-known national displays. That pavilion has almost always shown works by white artists.
“His singular work and his gift for oral literature feed on creolization by bringing together a multiplicity of materials, stories, shapes, and gestures,” the selection committee for the French Pavilion stated in a statement on Creuzet. The issues brought up by his works will have a particularly significant resonance with those of our time at the French Pavilion in Venice. Additionally, Julien Creuzet was chosen because of his perspectives that go beyond the conflict between individuality and universality and show how poetic and artistic echoes always leave a trace in the folding of art.
After recently winning the $20,000 Étant Donnés Prize, given to a French artist exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach, Creuzet is on a roll. Creuzet was a candidate for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2021 as well, France’s top art prize.
