Intellect

Guillaume Paris is an artist and professor of artistic practice at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. After initially studying engineering at the Cooper Union in New York City, he earned his BFA from that same institution in 1991. He subsequently pursued his art education at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, in Paris. He has been artist in residence at the Core Program in Houston, Texas, at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and at the Villa Medici in Rome. Paris has exhibited widely in France – with solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg – and internationnally, in New York, London, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Torino, Prague and Quebec. His work involves a complex and contemporary negotiation of the phenomena of fetishism, reification, faith and the general instrumentalisation of magical and religious thoughts in postmodern society.

The locus of his work is a critical investigation of the ideal of purity; a notion which he sees as fundamentally dangerous, and which he explores in terms of its political, philosophical, spiritual and commercial uses. Paris has been lecturing and teaching in art schools since 1996, both in Europe and Asia.