Pierre PINONCELLI (1929-2021)

Pierre Pinoncelli was born in 1929 in Saint-Etienne in France. The first part of his artistic life was devoted to painting. Pierre Pinoncelli started to paint in 1954. In 1962, he exhibited for the first time in Paris his series of “Quarante Morts” (“Forty Dead”) at the gallery Lacloche, place Vendôme, an exhibition praised by the press of the time.

He claims himself as a member of the School of Nice. He made himself known by spectacular and provocative happenings, which took an important place in his work from 1967.

“How are we an artist, how are we not? I never learned to be an artist. I constantly refer to childhood, real or simulated. When I die, even at 90 years, it will always be a child that dies, a real child, not the one that adults use to excuse their idiocy, their mistakes. I always maintain, even if it is reductive, that in the performance, I find again my spirit of childhood when I woke up in the morning and said to myself : I will do a coup ! “We must oppose the order of the world to the logical terrorism of childhood”, wrote Alain Schiffres.