Gilles Barbier
Born in 1965 in Nouvelles Hybrides (Vanuatu)
Lives and works in Marseille
Gilles Barbier studied art history in Aix-en-Provence and then at the Beaux-Arts in Marseille-Luminy

Gilles Barbier is a painter, draftsman, sculptor, photographer, and installation artist. In 1992, he was one of the four founders of the Association Astérides, which hosts artists in residence and gave rise to the Friche de la Belle de Mai in Marseille. In 1995, he created the Clônes, wax replicas of his dwarf body, which he stages in imaginary or everyday situations, sometimes pornographic or trivial. His pieces refer to comic books, TV series, cinema, and science fiction. Recurring elements appear: still lifes, bananas, houses, earthworms, pawns, cheese, holes, architectural models... The whole is intended, in a burlesque manner, as a meditation on the body, “a consumer's body,” identity, life, nature, the passing of time, and technology. He was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2005. His work is regularly exhibited in France and internationally.

Gilles Barbier said: “What has made art so precious is not that it produces images, nor that these images appear on the surface of this or that medium, but that it produces worlds, and that these worlds make it to the exhibition.”