Philippe Pasqua

Philippe Pasqua (born in Grasse in 1965) is a self-taught French artist known for his monumental portraits and vanitas works, exploring vulnerability, memory and mortality. His practice, rooted in a vigorous gestural energy, combines thick oils, glazes, erasures and drips, producing faces lacerated with light and shadow. He often paints marginalised or vulnerable people (sex workers, people with disabilities, those close to him), as well as human skulls and butterflies, motifs that bring together beauty and precariousness. From the 2000s onwards, he has developed sculptures (skulls, giant heads, carcasses) in bronze, marble or resin, as well as taxidermy pieces, including a life-size shark, heightening the memento mori dimension.

Taken up by galleries in France and abroad from the 1990s onwards, Pasqua has exhibited in institutions and private foundations and created site-specific installations, notably along the banks of the Seine in Paris. His project The Storage, in Saint‑Ouen, operates as both a laboratory and an archive space, opened to the public on occasion. Though he rejects academicism, his painting engages with a tradition stretching from Francis Bacon to Lucian Freud, while also partaking of a post‑punk aesthetic. Physical and empathetic, his work probes the dignity of bodies and the tension between attraction and dread.