Pierre Muckensturm

XXI 40 116 (Abstract Print)

2021

Pierre Muckensturm is a French abstract painter and print maker born in Strasbourg. His visual language is one of harmony, calm and timelessness built around softly textured surfaces and a muted, black and white palette. Muckensturm attended Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg. Later, while studying to become a teacher, he befriended Jean Jérôme, a university art instructor, who mentored him and inspired him to enroll in painting workshops. In 2010, he was an artist in residence at Boribana Museum of Contemporary Art in Dakar, Senegal. Muckensturm's work is included in multiple institutional collections, including that of the Museum of Fine Arts in Liège, Belgium, the Boribana Museum of Contemporary Art, Dakar, Senegal, and the Art Library of the City of La Roche-sur-Yon, France. Muckensturm has exhibited extensively in Europe, as well as in the United States and Canada.Muckensturm is inspired by the concepts of calmness, constancy and temporality. His work visually expresses a sense of harmony with time. Initially a figurative painter, he discovered abstraction in 2004 on a visit to Notre Dame du Haut, a Modernist chapel in Ronchamp, France, designed by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, otherwise known as Le Corbusier. The simplicity of its forms brought Muckensturm a feeling of tranquility. He began seeking ways to directly express how felt that day. His search brought him into contact with the work of Julius Bissier, whose simple, organic, gestural brushstrokes, evocative of Taoist painting techniques, also communicate a sense of calmness. In 2010, during an artist residency in Africa, Muckensturm became inspired by the differences in how time is observed in Senegalese culture, versus the culture in which he was raised. He has since been exploring these various ideas in his work, expressing calmness and an open ended view of time.