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Indepth Arts News:
"Didier Courbot"
2007-05-05 until 2007-06-16
Susan Hobbs Gallery
Toronto, ON,
CA Canada
Opening on May 5, and continuing through June 16, French artist Didier Courbot will present new work in the gallery. Working with a range of media—sculpture, video, photography—Courbot documents the often overlooked elements of the urban environment by, variably, re-creating its specific features, such as the ubiquitous city bench (sculpture), drawing attention to the discarded and found, with the act of carrying around in his hand small items that he has retrieved from the ground (video), and constructing and documenting practical mechanisms for urban dwelling (photography).
In each instance, Courbot translates the act of observation into a work, as he did in his needs series, a series of photographs that documented the artist making improvements to a particular environment – painting the lines of a crosswalk in Rome, planting flowers at the side of the highway in Saint Jean- Port Joli, replacing the missing plank of a bench seat in Prague, and so on.
Paris-based Didier Courbot was born in Hazebrouck (Nord), France in 1967, and studied at the Ecole regionale des Beaux-Arts in Dunkerque. His work has been broadly exhibited throughout the world, including solo exhibitions at Scai The Bathhouse (Tokyo); Fondation Cartier (Paris), and Villa Medicis (Rome). He has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, among them, P.S.1 (New York, 1997), Miro Fondation (Barcelona, 1998), Yokohama Triennale (Japan, 2005), Musée Zadkine (Paris) and Kunstverein Freiburg (Germany, 2006), and recently Conceptual Romanticism, Bewag Foundation, Vienna curated by Jorg Heiser.
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