Bathing Beauties, 2017

Olivier Masmonteil   Emerging artists

Born in 1973 in Romilly-sur-Seine. Lives and works in Paris.

Olivier Masmonteil spent his childhood in Corrèze. After plastic arts classes at the Arsonval high school and then at the Jacques Gabriel Chevalier Academy in Brive, he studied at the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts from 1996 to 1999.

He stayed in Leipzig for a little over a year in 2005-2006, where he rubbed shoulders with the art of the Leipzig School. A globe-trotting artist, in 2008-2009 he traveled around the world, resulting in a set of a thousand small paintings of identical formats that make up the series Whatever the minute of the day. In 2012, he completed his second world tour in Asia (India, Thailand, Vietnam) and South America (Chile, Brazil).

In 2012, he undertook the series Les Demoiselles Oubliées for which he will pay homage to Titien, Vermeer, Courbet or even Aux Dentelles Lumineuses by Willem Kahlf or, more surprisingly, to Eugène Leroy.

In 2014 he tackled a new series, La Mémoire du Passé. Still part of his sequence The Pleasure of Painting, Olivier Masmonteil then seeks to revisit a collective memory constituted by the history of art.

In 2016, he tackled a new series, Les Baigneuses. Always drawing inspiration from the history of art, paintings or romantic sculptures, he mixes and reinterprets these bathers with old photos of landscapes and images gleaned from the internet or taken during his travels.

Find this artist and many more in our collection of works from the rich and colorful figurations movement.