Work from the Collection

Laocoon

Artist: Etienne Bossut

Date of creation: 2005

Domain: Sculpture

Medium: Moulding

Materials: Resin, Clear gel coat

Collection: Lafayette Anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin

Date of acquisition: 2013

Etienne Bossut, Laocoon, Sculpture, 2005, Collection Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin © DR

The titles of Etienne Bossut’s works are essential to their understanding. Carefully chosen, they play with forms and language by referring to the history of art or cinema. They are clues to help us see. The title Laocoon refers to the famous Greek sculpture whose Roman copy is kept in the Vatican Museums: it represents a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in pain, suffocated by a gigantic sea serpent. Here, the father and his sons have disappeared: only the snake remains and, without its prey, it coils around the void. The accumulation of identical casts of seat and the use of a translucent resin with an organic character give the impression that it is only the slough of a snake or a gigantic insect—caterpillar or millipede—monstrous yet full of grace and poetry. Etienne Bossut proceeds here to a distanced imitation which displaces and transforms the original subject, but through moulding, he indicates that what we are looking at is not the original object—a chair—but its image, its history, that of sculpture and art as a whole.

Text written by Marianne Tricoire as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.

Exhibitions

Vie des formes
Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris (France)
from 08 Sep to 13 Sep 2026

Sculpter (faire à l'atelier)
FRAC Bretagne, Rennes (France)
from 14 Mar to 27 May 2018

POP UP Truck
Galeries Lafayette, Paris (France)
from 03 Jun to 04 Jun 2016

Laocoon(s)
Musée Rodin, ()
from 15 Oct 2008 to 22 Feb 2009

P2P - Peer to peer
Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
from 26 Jan to 06 Apr 2008

Antidote 3
La Galerie des Galeries, Paris (France)
from 13 Sep to 03 Nov 2007

"One"
Galerie Espace MICA, Rennes (France)

À propos de l'artiste

Etienne Bossut

Born in 1946 in Saint-Chamond, France

Étienne Bossut réalise ses sculptures d’objets ordinaires – sièges, bidons, frigidaires,, couteaux de cuisine, etc. – avec des moulages en polyester teinté dans la masse. En conférant un nouveau statut à ces objets industriels, il les déplace du champ de la consommation vers le domaine de l’art. Le résultat, d’une vérité trompeuse, explore la porosité entre la copie, l’imitation et la création tout en incitant le spectateur à questionner son rapport aux objets.

Né en 1946 à Saint-Chamond (France), Étienne Bossut a été diplômé de l’École des Beaux-arts de Saint-Étienne en 1970. Ses œuvres font partie de nombreuses collections publiques françaises. Il vit et travaille à Rennes (France).