Stéphane Couturier

E1027/123 – Villa Eileen Gray – Photo #23

2021-2022

Stéphane Couturier is a French contemporary artist and photographer, born in 1957, in Neuilly Sur Seine, France. He currently lives and works in Paris. In 1994, he showed his first works in a series, called Urban Archaeology, viewing the city as a living organism with multiple aspects. He photographed it deliberately, avoiding anything that suggested poetry, nostalgia or strangeness. From 1999 onwards, Stéphane was increasingly drawn to the suburbs and began to focus on a different type of landscape. On the one hand, by tackling housing blocks and high-rises in his Monuments series and on the other, by photographing mushrooming housing developments. These generic cities soon became his favorite subject. In 2002, the uniformity and repetitiveness of these landscapes around the world drove him to begin working on the concept of the polyptych, the combinations and interchangeability of each of the elements in a polyptych give rise to a play with Landscaping, with the spectator recomposing a landscape between reality and fiction. With a new body of work, called Melting Point, Stéphane changed his visual approach in 2005. This series presents a Toyota assembly plant in Valenciennes, France. It also evolved with new subjects, like the Indian city of Chandigarh, built by Le Corbusier and the Brazilian city of Brasilia, built by Oscar Niemeyer, from 2007–10.