AP N°0964 (2024) Painting by Yann Dumoget

Born in in 1970, Yann Dumoget works and lives in Montpellier. After a Master’s degree in History of Arts and Archeology, he began his career as a drummer in a rock band and satisfied his pictorial aspirations by doing their set design, posters, album covers and other merchandising.
In 1999 Yann Dumoget decided to devote himself to fine art. While painting was out of favour within contemporary art, he locked himself in his studio to realize an unusual performance. By painting one picture a day for a year, he created 366 paintings for the year 2000 on which he invited friends, family, artists and the public to add their own intervention by drawing and writing directly on the painting with a black pen. He called this singular action “graffitying” and it became a central element of his practice.
In 2001, he moved to Berlin and ed its active art scene. He was particularly influenced by Franz Ackermann et Jim Avignon and progressively lost interest in galleries and contemporary art centers. He then concentrated on actions and live performances that were conceived out of an economy of means and ambition.
Most of these actions were realized in East Berlin with the group Kunst der Nähe that he founded. In 2002, at the Documenta 11 in Kassel, his action Doklomenta had critical acclaim. In this art work, visitors were invited to graffiti - either in real life or virtually on the internet- on 11 of his paintings in toilets around the city of Kassel.
Back in in 2004, Yann created many actions in which the production of paintings was only the first stage of the work. In all of his paintings and in different contexts, he asked people to finish them by making adding their own graffiti. He then put together and documented these graffitied paintings while associating them with other disciplines like photography, video and music.
Centered around a system of interrelationships, his “shared paintings” aim to generate a social space that reveal the stakes of a symbolic “being together”. In a globalized world that is involved with questions of identity, economy and science, his paintings are a way to look at the indispensable character of the diversity of sharing as the condition of all life in society.
In 2008, he started le chant des pistes (Songlines) : a relational nomadism that he pursued around the world until 2010. For the first time the “graffiti actions” don’t have the painting as material . The basis of the work is the shipping of written messages and drawings on pieces of newspaper. One of the results will be an installation of all the material that he has “blackened” against himself (train and metro tickets, invoices, entrance tickets…). This body of work is presented at the Louis Vuitton Cultural Center for the Ailleurs exhibition under the commission of Paul Ardenne.

In 2011, he has returned to painting adding textual elements, sounds, photographs and video clips for La ligne du jour (The line of the day) a game that ...

• Nationality:
• Date of birth : 1970
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists,
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists