A major figure of theFrench contemporary art disappears. According to information from our colleagues at nice morning, the artist Benjamin Vautier, known under the pseudonym Ben, was found dead this Wednesday, June 5. He was 88 years old. Deeply anchored in the city of Nice, where he set up his famous Store at the end of the 1950s, now in the collections of the Center Pompidou, Ben died at his home in Nice.
Major figure of avant-garde Fluxus movement in the 1960s, Ben embodies, even in popular culture, the emphasis on the idea and the artistic process rather than the material work. Symbol of this artistic commitment, his signature and his sentences written in white on a black background had become a brandtraces present on hundreds of objects of all kinds and immediately recognizable to millions of French people.
Nice Matin reports that Christian Estrosi said he was “upset and inconsolable”. “He will leave the image of a formidable artist who made the Nice school shine,” he says. They are reunited with his wife from whom he was inseparable. I think of his daughter Eva.”
Read more
