Philippe Durand is a French artist born in 1963 in Oullins. He teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Until the 2010s, Philippe Durand worked with a post-documentary approach, bearing witness to the practices and constraints of everyday life. Modernity thus became a trail to follow in his work.

A flâneur and observer of circumstances, his work incorporated surface reflections like a collage, creating a double perspective on our surroundings and on reality. Around the 2010s, in response to technological advancements in photography, he began to evolve his practices, working with multiple exposures and color filters, thus distorting the initial images and drawing closer to a painterly approach. This was also when he started working with large-format cyanotypes to capture, at a 1:1 scale, the interplay of shadows and sunlight on trees, plants, and grasses.

"He also explores photogram research on paper and on non-flat surfaces like marble pebbles. His work is included in numerous public collections, such as Frac Bretagne, the Musée du Grand-Hornu, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Annecy, Frac Auvergne, and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Additionally, he was awarded the Ministry of Culture’s prize for his project Chauvet, l’aventure intérieure, the result of a psychedelic journey back to prehistory.

We are honored to present 12 Cyanotypes in the exhibition Herbaria, Seen and Dreamed.

To find out about his latest work, please visit his website:
https://philippedurand.fr/