Etienne Clément

“We all live in the world as we imagine it, as we create it.” Andrei Tarkovsky / Nostalghia.
When it comes to creative play, there are two types of children. Those who build structures, be they complex towers in their minds or structures with Meccano, and those who build stories; not that the two are mutually exclusive but in play they often polarise. The child’s theatre, a cardboard interior often made in the form of a pop-up book, becomes the ultimate non-architectural space. It is all innards and no architectonic structure. It is all dress and no frame, whilst the Meccano tower is the essence of rationalised integrity with little space for humanity. This of course is an unacceptable dichotomy. Etienne Clément’s intensely alluring but deviously complex works weave these two types of play together. The formal drama of architecture abuts the personal and political allegories of his play-mobile-esque narratives. They jar, when Clément wants them to and then merge in a tricksy fashion when he wants to entice the viewer into closer communion.
Clément is a ‘storysmith’. Ingredients for his narratives are both fact and fiction. It allows him to make up stories, to ‘start’ legends in any particular place he chooses.
He builds up s...

Clément’s work has been widely exhibited in the UK, at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in the Jerwood Space, at Bloomberg’s ArtFutures, the Architectural Association, the RIBA Gallery, the Geffrye Museum and the V&A Museum of Childhood in London. He also has exhibited at Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris.
He has shown work at the Printmakers Gallery Edinburgh alongside the likes of the Chapman Brothers, Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol.
Etienne Clément was born in Paris and studied at La Sorbonne and l’Ecole du Louvre. He was a prize winner in the European Architectural Photographer of the Year 1997.
He is an artist member of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS). He lives and works in London.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
May 2019 Les Fêtes Galantes, London
Dec 2018 Les Fêtes Galantes, London
Feb 2010 V&A Museum of Childhood, London
Mar 2009 Forster Gallery, London
Sept 2007 Forster Gallery, London
Mar 2007 Galería Fruela, Madrid
Dec 2005 thecentralhouse Gallery, London
Jan 2005 Photofusion Gallery, London
Dec 2004 Palais des Congrès, Paris
Feb 2003 Geffrye Museum, London
Dec 2002 BALTIC, Gateshead
Sept 2002 The Architectural Association, London
Feb 2002 RIBA Architecture Gallery, London
Nov 1999 The Architectural Association, London
Jan 1996 The Architectural Association, London