Jean-Marie Appriou

Duarte Sequeira is thrilled to present works from Jean-Marie Appriou, an exploration of marine animals inspired by Arnold Böcklin's painting "Saint Anthony Preaching to the Fish".

Opening on June 8th, the exhibition marks the gallery's 5th anniversary and the first group presentation at the gallery's Sculpture Park.

Delving into the symbiotic relationship between land and sea, air and water, the exhibition includes a series of sculptures made from a variety of materials including aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, and wax. Appriou creates fantastical worlds inhabited by an array of creatures, where reality merges with myth, and the boundaries of imagination are expanded further.

Spanning from archaic ages to futuristic civilizations, Appriou's work features visions that teeter on the edge of psychedelia. Bledning pop culture with mythologies from Greek and Egyptian antiquity to science fiction, Appriou creates a paradoxical narrative that unites the past and the future, the ideal and the perceptible, in a series of hallucinatory ecstasies.

In Appriou's cosmos, water symbolises a passage to a higher state of consciousness. Sea creatures emerge as active messengers of connection, inviting us to contemplate the essence of our existence and to recognise the profound interconnectedness of life. Appriou suggests that marine life inspires us to explore our genealogy beyond contemporary living beings, back to the primordial earth. 

Appriou’s works have been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions at Perrotin, Shanghai; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Vienna and New York; Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo; C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels and Los Angeles and MASSIMODECARLO, London and Hong Kong. His work has also been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; the Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Consortium Museum, Dijon; The Villa Medici, Roma, the Biennale de Lyon and the 7th Jing'an International Sculpture Project, Shanghai. He was invited by the Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park in New York, at the Château de Versailles and at the Vienna Biennale. In 2023, he was choosen by Donatien Grau to engrave a copper plate and produce an etching, La Constellation du Louvre, 2023 that entered the Musée du Louvre collection. His works have been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions at Perrotin, Shanghai; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Vienna and New York; Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo; C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels and Los Angeles and MASSIMODECARLO, London and Hong Kong.