Denis Defrancesco

Denis Defrancesco is a French artist born on 28 June 1954. He lives and works between Prague, Budapest and Aix-en-Provence. 

A Multifaceted Artist

Self-taught, atypical, and iconoclastic, Denis Defrancesco uses a whole range of techniques and materials to give form to his ideas, fantasies, and anxieties. 

A great ape in bronze, a giant plexiglass rabbit, a blow-up doll made of marble, a plastic Obama, a steel machine for slicing memories, a urinal in oil paint... He keeps giving the world his own twist, transfiguring reality to tell us stories: a childhood fear, a teenage memory, a passionate loveaffair, time fleeting, the body declining, death lurking. It is pop, electric, often bold, and always free. 

His work, both carnal and scientific, blends bronze with marble, paint with plexiglass, steel with plastic. He likes nothing more than mixing genres and spurning styles. 

Denis Defrancesco is an exalted introvert, an exhibitionist full of modesty, who creates an eclectic, surprising, insolent, and personal body of work with his monumental sculptures, 3-D paintings, and metamorphosised idols. 

A text accompanies each of his sculptures and paintings, like the key to a specific story.

His First Exhibition

At the GAA Foundation, in Venice, during the 2017 Viva Arte Viva Biennale. The most striking collateral event of the festival, according to the organisers