ERIC MICHEL

Bio

Eric Michel was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1962. He started to learn music and painting at the age of nine through the Martenot artistic education method. After completing advanced studies in mathematics and economy, he started a career in international finance while pursuing his creative activities.

He showed his work at numerous exhibitions in Tokyo, where he lived until 2002 as president of an American financial firm. In December 2003, his work was presented at the Senza Frontiere International Biennale Art Exhibition in Kawasaki. Since then, his video works and light sculptures have been regularly shown at museums, galleries, and contemporary art events worldwide. In November 2007, the Shanghai Museum for Contemporary Art presented his video work Swimming Fluo. Most modern art museums in China also showed this piece, notably at the Sport in Art Exhibition sponsored by the Beijing 2008 Olympic Committee. In 2009, he created two multimedia installations: for the Yves Klein Archives in Paris and another for the Museum of Modern Art and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice.

Since 2011, his large-scale permanent lighting installation Les Moulins de Lumière has been visible every evening until midnight in the skyline north of Paris on the neo-industrial site called Les Grands Moulins de Pantin. In 2011, his monumental monochrome of light Fluo Blue became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Contemporary Art in Nice. His neon work La lumière Parle was exhibited in 2012 at La Maison Rouge Foundation in Paris. In 2013, his exhibition Passeur de Lumière offered a dialogue with Le Corbusier’s architecture at La Tourette convent near Lyon, and in 2014 he was invited to create a monumental lighting installation to surround Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony at the Philharmonie in Luxembourg.

Following Yves Klein, James Turrell, and Dan Flavin’s path, his work, particularly his fluorescent neon installations and videos, creates a vibrating space in a search for immateriality.

“I love the light. It is the privileged vehicle for my sensitivity, for my work. Light has something unique: it is simultaneously corpuscular and undulatory, material and immaterial. As far as I’m concerned, the artist needs to be a ferryman, to be precise between the material to the immaterial, from the real to the imaginary, towards a pure sensitivity.” – ERIC MICHEL.