User:Peter.briggs

Peter Briggs (b.1950) is an English-born sculptor who has lived in France since 1973. Educated at Hornsey College of Art and l'École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, he has exhibited widely in France, USA, Italy and India since the 1980's. His work, shown at the 1980 Paris Biennale, was concerned with geography and geology, other installations made from stone, steel and glass followed, two pieces from this period are in the collection of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Other shows followed with Chantal Crousel, and the Zabriskie Gallery in Paris and New York. In 1988 Blandine Chavanne showed his work in a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée Sainte Croix in Poitiers, France. Michel Enrici wrote a comprehensive essay on the artist’s work in a catalogue for the show, subsequently shown at the Centre d'Arts Contemporains-Carré Saint Vincent in Orléans. A visit to Badami in Karnataka state, India and a residency at the Abbey of Fontevraud marked a radical change in his work; natural materials and modelling became an important part of his vocabulary as a sculptor. He worked using foundry techniques which he adapted to his own ends, making direct lost wax and wood castings in bronze and cast iron. The ultimate piece in this series was cast, fifteen years after having been made, at the Uttarayan Foundation near Baroda in the Gujurat late in 2007, the piece is now in the collection of this Indian foundation. Later in the 1990's he was invited to work at the Manufacture de Sèvres and made a long series of directly modelled porcelain pieces. After a time spent at the Sanskriti Foundation, he has set up a studio in Delhi, India where he lives and works episodically. He showed at Peter Nagy's gallery in Delhi, 'Nature Morte' in 2001 where he met Suneet Chopra, whose text was published the following year in a catalogue for a solo show 'Main Courante' in Mulhouse, France. It was for these exhibitions that he made the first convex mirrors he has shown subsequently in Naples and Sicily, and in many solo exhibitions recently. Two large site-specific mirrors were commissioned in 2005 for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours, his home town, where they are on permanent show. A recent publication on his graphic work entitled 'Taxidermies' ed. Monografik Editions, was published in New Delhi in 2007, with an article by Juliet Fleming. She writes on Briggs' recent graphic site-specific projects in Italy, India and France and the artist’s collage work, his relation to writing and his use of books on graphology. Briggs is working at present on a project using scanned images from Aldrovandi's 'Storia Naturale', making enamelled steel and latex pieces which will be shown in shows in Italy and France. A full biography and many images are available on his website http://www.peterbriggssculpture.com/.