Aurélien Couput

Unicorn

2022

Aurélien Couput is a French-born painter who lives and works in New York City. Born in 1979, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva before completing his MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts in 2013, where he has since served as an adjunct professor. His practice spans painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking, with moody oil paintings on paper and canvas forming the core of his work. Couput’s paintings depart from photographic source material — images connected to historical and, at times, tragic or controversial events within the United States. Working with these images, he edits and omits, removing the figures and focal points that originally gave each photograph its meaning. In doing so, what had once been background becomes subject: the landscape steps forward, separated from its original context and encountered simply as paint and image. As the artist has described it, the work “forces a de-sensitization to the subject,” allowing the once-recognizable image to exist as a landscape on its own terms. His approach to oil painting carries a kinship with watercolor. Beginning with a sketch, Couput works responsively, attending closely to the way paint absorbs into the surface. The resulting marks range from dense and substantial to soft and atmospheric. He works with a deliberately restrained palette — three browns, two blues, a red, an orange, and occasionally white — lending the paintings their characteristic quietness and tonal cohesion. Across his work, Couput explores the relationship between memory, perception, and absence. Through reduction and omission, his paintings transform documentary imagery into meditative landscapes suspended between history and atmosphere. Couput has received international recognition for his work, including the Prix de la Foire Internationale de Dessin (FID) in Paris, the Raymond Weil International Photography Prize, and the 8th LVMH Young Artists’ Award. He was featured in New American Paintings MFA Annual #99. His work has been exhibited throughout New York, Paris, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Spain, and China.