Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is the winner of the Confirmation Prize in Sculpture awarded by the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation 2023 – French Institut, upon proposal of the French Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux-Arts).
The prize is endowed with 25 000 euros and focuses on European artists. This year prizes have been awarded for sculpture and musical composition, in parallel with the “Grand Prix” of the Cino Del Duca Foundation.
Major figure in the landscape of contemporary international art, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot attempts to give an autonomous form to music and sound by creating installations that use combination of materials and media to generate sound forms, that he qualifies as alive. He invites us to be listeners who also see, who explore the modalities of permanence and present and to be, as he calls it, «distracted listeners». Noises in our daily environment or residual noises that are not made for a musical purpose are rich in a potential that Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installations transform into a «listening experience».
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works was exhibited in numerous contemporary art venues. The most recent solo exhibitions include off-road at the Arter Musuem, Istanbul in 2019, liquide liquide at the Fondation François Schneider Watwiller, fluids at the Hab Galerie for the Voyage à Nantes in 2018, sonsara at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai in 2017, acquaalta at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France.
In 2015, he represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale, with the project rêvolution created for the French pavilion, curated by Emma Lavigne. He also was the first French artist to be awarded the International Studio Program (PS1) in New York in 1998-99.
