Denis Monfleur, People of stone

museum / art / bordeaux / culture / rock

2 June 2023 - 7 January 2024

From 2 June 2023 to 7 January 2024, explore the artistic world of Denis Monfleur in his exhibition "Peuples de Pierre" at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux.

The first major solo exhibition in France, Peuples de pierre presents nearly 100 works by the artist Denis Monfleur (born in 1962 in Périgueux), at the Galerie, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts and outside in the garden of the Hôtel de Ville and on the forecourt of the Galerie.
Playing with different formats and alternating between powerful and monumental sculptures weighing several tons, carved in the quarries, and small, "intimate and portable" pieces, the artist is one of the few of his generation to perpetuate the ancestral tradition of direct carving and to confront the hardest stones. His work is part of a secular tradition of sculpture, from Romanesque art to Giacometti, via Michelangelo, Picasso and Dubuffet.
Self-taught and active since the end of the 1980s, Denis Monfleur divides his time between his studio in Fontenay-sous-Bois (Val de Marne) and his native Périgord. After starting out as a practitioner for José Subira-Puig and Marcel van Thienen, he subsequently developed a personal approach and gave a new direction to his career by turning to granite, basalt and diorite, with extensive work on patinas, polychromy and an original work of enamelling volcanic lava.