Nicolas Momein

Nicolas Momein, born in 1980 in Saint-Étienne, lives and works in Paris. As a first step, he trained as an upholsterer. Then, he resumed his studies and graduated from the École Supérieure d’art et de design de Saint Etienne in 2011 and from the Haute École d’Art et Design de Genève (HEAD) in 2012. His first solo exhibition took place in 2012 in Paris at the gallery White Project. His meeting with Bernard Ceysson, the historical curator of the modern art mu– seum in Saint-Étienne, while he was still a student, made him integrate thereafter in 2015 the gallery that the curator founded and which represents him today, the gallery Ceysson et Bentière. His work has been subject to numerous personal and collective exhibitions and has entered the collections of the Institute of contemporary art in Villeurbanne, the Frac Champagne-Ardennes or the contemporary art funds of the cities in Paris and Geneva.

Work

Nicolas Memein’s work is built between sculpture and painting. He creates sculptures, objects or paintings with hybrid forms, sometimes realistic, sometimes organic, often diverted from their primary use or in metamorphosis. The materials he uses are also chosen for their particular properties (relation to the evocation of past memory of an artist, link to the artisans, to the nature etc.) and here too, taken away from their initial vocation : bulgomme, rubber, horsehair, rock wool, soap, salt, vintage towels… these elements often enter before and after their first exhibition in a process of recy– cling and exchange. Thus, in the strange and poetic universe of Nicolas Momein, which Alphonse Allais would not have denied more than Marcel Duchamp, the surrealists than the conceptualists, protocols envisage that the salt stones are sculpted by the cows which come to lick them, a huge soap lagoon stretches across the floor of the Biennale de Lyon before being transformed into soaps by other artists.