A QUESTION OF IDENTITY
About finding content
“I make art about art, because art is my life… and that sums it up.”
Stéphane Ducret
Portrait of Josh Smith, 2023
from the My Own Private Museum series
2023
188 x 138 x 3,5 cm | 74 x 54 ⅓ x 1 ⅓ inches
Private Collection, Cologny
Stéphane Ducret
Untitled (Sterling Ruby SP123, 2010, spray paint on canvas)
from the My Own Private Museum series
2024
Oil, oil stick and pencil on linen
218 x 165 x 3,5 cm | 85 ⅞ x 65 x 1 ⅓ inches
Stéphane Ducret
Painting Number 5 (#PaulMcCarthy #LucTuymans)
from the Real Estate series
2019
Oil and oilstick on canvas
208 x 188 x 4 cm | 81 ⅞ x 74 x 1 ¾ inches
Collection of the artist
The paintings of the My Own Private Museum series raise the question of the creator's identity and confront the void, the blank page, even the erasure of the self.
Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Stéphane Ducret tackles a subject dear to psychology : the identification with reference characters in order to be loved, or to avoid rejection. In doing so, he questions our need for recognition and our relation to an ubiquitous and growing omniscient digital environment.
In the Real Estate series, Stéphane Ducret explores the relationship between reality and imagination, between knowledge and recognition, blurring limits of perception.
Contemporary masterpieces are combined in imaginary settings in which Stéphane Ducret creates new narratives, disconnected from their original context, setting up a complex and highly referenced multi-sided imaginary dialogue, in which he takes up and develops the discourse of the artists he quotes.
ABOUT STÉPHANE DUCRET
“I see my work as a psychological wandering through the art world, a questioning of how we are influenced by recurrence and by the art market driven by powerful figures.”