On Tuesday October 15, the Bibliothèque nationale de France inaugurated a major monographic exhibition devoted to the engraved work of Damien Deroubaix on its Richelieu site. Painter, draughtsman, sculptor and engraver, Deroubaix is one of the artists born in the 1970s who have brought printmaking to a high level, while renewing our view of techniques too often considered as crafts.

 

With over 46 works published at and by URDLA since 2001, as well as works from other studios such as Item, René Tazé, Bérangère Lipreau, Stéphane Guilbaud, Stoob St Gallen and Tabor PRESSE in Berlin, the exhibition traces an artistic trajectory linked to the great printmaking masters, from Dürer to Gauguin.

The back-and-forth between watercolors, paintings, sculptures and prints, mainly in black and white, forms the basis of his visual work. From this point on, it is impossible to dissociate the practice of multiple printing from the whole of his work: both feed and respond to each other. This dynamic was already exemplified in his space at La Force de l'Art 02.

 

Over the years, his tributes to the great masters of engraving, revisiting and questioning their work, have woven a singular practice rooted in history. Dürer was the focus of a monographic exhibition at URDLA and in Nuremberg (2008), with seven large-scale woodcuts (160 x 120 cm) combining Deroubaix's language with quotations from the German painter and engraver. In 2012, his dialogue with Goya gave rise to a suite of etchings and aquatints presented at the Musée de Castres. His agility in transcribing his pictorial language into the black and white of the graphic arts, combined with an inextinguishable desire for prints, has led him to collaborate with many renowned studios. The exhibition poster and catalog cover, for example, feature a work printed by Tabor PRESSE in Berlin, underlining the diversity of collaborations that have marked his career.


Since his first exhibitions, test prints, cut out and integrated into unique works, have rubbed shoulders with large-scale watercolors. This seamless blending of media runs through his international projects. For example, “Die Nacht” was shown successively at Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken, Villa Merkell in Esslingen (2009), and the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen, where the Stoob studio also played a role.

Today, with Picasso et moi at Mudam (Luxembourg) - a dialogue that began in 2014 at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence - Damien Deroubaix revisits Picasso motifs through a series of twenty-five etchings (etching, aquatint, drypoint), produced in René Tazé's Paris studio and published by Item.