Olivier Blanckart

In the Moi en:… series initiated over thirty years ago, Olivier Blanckart toyed with icons of pop culture, ironically diverting their appearance, attitude or expression. The artist himself disturbingly reinterpreted famous politicians and artists identifiable at first glance, such as Angela Merkel, Moammar Kadhafi, Honoré de Balzac, Gérard Depardieu, David Lynch and even Laurel & Hardy. Between self-portrait, caricature and performance, his gallery of characters addresses the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between private identity and public image.

For his XXth Century Lonely Art Camp – in extremis installation, Olivier Blanckart built a three-dimensional reinterpretation of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. The original image, designed in 1967 by Peter Blake, one of the fathers of British pop art, showed the Fab Four in colorful uniforms surrounded by a pantheon of famous characters. In this diverted version, the artist realigned life-size figures of prominent personalities in the history of modern art. Visitors could identify these personalities exhibited on the Salle del Castillo stage, and try to tell the real portraits apart from the pastiches the artist incarnated himself.