Francois Monnet

François Monnet (b.1946). Monnet grew up during the 1960s and was inspired by the artistic atmosphere of the time. In the art world, a multitude of powerful changes were also taking place. Pop Art, adopting the culture of mass media through the works of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann, was gradually breaking down the bases on which the production and reception of art were built. Getting inspired from the imagery of popular culture and mass consumerism, the Pop Artists refuted the authority of highbrow art and created a cutting-edge movement, while Minimalism, simultaneously appearing, was rejecting any form of emotional manifestation and focused on art’s theoretical features – aspiring to pure visual responses. Simplicity and an void of emotions were key concepts in the highly influential movement of Minimalism, embodied by artists like Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Uninterested in the gestural elements of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalist artists focused on delivering artworks mainly composed of polished, clean lines and geometrical elements. The very first blossoming of Conceptualism was highly influenced by the purity of Minimalism but went further in rejecting all pre-existing conceptions inherent to art, similarly to what Pop Artists were trying to attain, by uplifting popular culture to the status of high art. Several schools of philosophy profoundly influenced creatives, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti were artists fundamentally persuaded by the ideas of Existentialism, who achieved worldwide success through their depiction of the human form and the anguish often associated with the human condition. Internationally, a significant number of art movements resonated with the radical changes of the 1960s, often prone to their own regional distinctions. In Italy, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni created Spatialism, while in Germany, the Zero group espoused similar ideas under the leadership of Günther Uecker.