Mathieu Cherkit

The interior scenes painted by Mathieu Cherkit are disarmingly familiar, exploring domestic life in all its trivial familiarity. Even in his self-portraits and his street, garden and plant paintings, we are struck by a strange sense of déjà vu. Yet, despite his rendering of the smallest details down to the anecdotal, his painting seems suddenly to shift into a more historical and metaphysical dimension: historical, when he cites his predecessors in the field of painting, in particular those who produced abstract works, even though his own are viscerally figurative; metaphysical, through its temporal and spatial kaleidoscope, disrupting perspective and intersecting planes in the manner of the Cubists. It is from this painting, with its subjects captured directly in thick impasto, that the Mathieu Cherkit’s tender and constantly amazed gaze on his daily life ultimately emerges.

Born in Paris in 1982 and currently living in Vallery (Yonne department in central France), Mathieu Cherkit graduated from the Nantes School of Fine Arts and the Hochshule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, and has become a major figure of the emerging generation of French figurative painters. He was a finalist for the Jean-François Prat Prize (2013), the Science-Po Prize for Contemporary Art (2013) and the Antoine Marin Prize (2011). His works are included in numerous public collections—the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the MO.CO., the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy de Provence and the Musée des Avelines in Saint-Cloud. They also feature in private collections such as the Salomon Foundation and the Colas Foundation in France, as well as the Caldic Collection / Voorlinden Museum and the AkzoNobel Art Foundation in the Netherlands.