Bastien Aubry at Mayday

Artist: Bastien Aubry

Exhibition title: L’imbécile heureux

Venue: Mayday, Basel, Switzerland

Date: November 6 – December 19, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Mayday, Basel

Bastien Aubry‘s attention is focused on the banal things of everyday life, failure and current social and pop-cultural phenomena. By experimenting with a wide variety of materials, techniques, artistic methods and the pre-cise use of cultural codes, he creates works that are diverse in terms of media. Aubry sees his objects, sculptures, drawings and installations as enigmatic commentaries on the current state of our world.

In the exhibition “L‘imbécile heureux” (Engl. “The Happy Fool”), Bastien Aubry is showing a new, expansive group of works inspired by modernist aesthetics in design and art as well as a seemingly staid office world: in it, information boxes are misappropriated and become displays for his own drawings and collages, magnetic walls become plaster reliefs with rhythmi-cally composed pictorial elements. The objects take on a playful life of their own, for example by spiking printed polystyrene cubes with free forms— they show fragmented and graphically reduced images of office furniture. With the association to oversized aperitif cubes, cheese cubes that are eaten with toothpicks for aperitifs, the artist takes the snack culture as well as the classical sculptural concept of pedestal and work into the absurd. The exhibition title refers to an artist figure who stages reality as his own world, guided by chance, lustfully spontaneous decisions and breaks with the rules of art.

Bastien Aubry (*1974 in Saint-Imier, lives and works in Zurich) studied at the Schools of Fine Arts in Bern and Biel. Since 2010 he has been part of the artist group Aubry Broquard, which has been presented in numerous inter-national exhibitions, including at the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art (New York), MABA (Paris) and the Murray White Room (Melbourne). Since 2017, Bastien Aubry has continued his artistic practice solo. Most recently, his work was shown in a exhibition at Kupper Modern in Zurich in 2020.