Bernard Métranve

Bernard Métranve is a French artist born in the French Ardennes in 1949. After studying literature, he turned towards sculpture at a young age.

His long journeys in West Africa and South America (Costa Rica and Colombia) have influenced the techniques and the materials he uses. In Africa, he practiced mainly carving directly on wood and ceramic. In America and Europe, he preferred working in bronze. In 1989 he meet a skilled founder, Abel Marta, from the Susse Foundry in Paris, this meeting was a crucial moment because his work on bronze was greatly influenced from this meeting.

Bernard Metranve's artistic expression is at the boundary of abstraction. Through curves and contrasts, he questions the human’s position in the environment, fundamental to the artist, it can be reassuring or scary. In the series « Errances » and « Les Processionnaires », he develops a reflexion about the human role in the chaos of the universe. The overlap of a natural object and a human object in the series « Cascades », « Rivières » and « Les Métamorphoses » also aims a reflexion.