David Douard
Born in 1983 in Perpignan, France. He lives and works in Aubervilliers
Language is the source of David Douard’s work. Texts and poems that he collects on the internet are manipulated, transformed, and thus become a vital and fluid flow that inspires his sculptures. Language acts in David Douard’s work like a material in its own right. Through it, he redefines a new, hybrid social space, amid major transformation. By injecting anonymous poems into it, always based on a form of chaos, deviance, illness or frustration, he recreates a contaminated environment parallel to the real world, heightened by the fantasy of new digital technologies.
A graduate of the École nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011 and currently a teacher at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris Cergy, his work has been presented within the framework of solo and collective exhibitions, by international institutions such as the UCCA Dune Center for Contemporary Art in Qinhuangdao, China, in 2023; at the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2022; FRAC Île-de- France in Paris in 2020; the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2019; the KURA. c/o Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, in Milan in 2018; the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2014 and 2018; the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 2015 and 2017; the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2016; at the Fridericianum Kassel in 2015; the Sculpture Center in New York in 2014; the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo in 2014; and the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris in 2012.
David Douard has participated in several biennials including the Biennale de Lyon in 2013, the Taipei Biennial in 2014, and the Gwangju Biennale in 2018. He was a resident at the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici in 2017–18. In 2017, he won the Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize, at the Artissima Fair in Turin. His works have entered the collections of Fondation Serralves, Porto; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; CNAP, Paris; FRAC Île-de- France, Paris; and FRAC Limousin, Limoges.
