Artists

Jacques Toussaint was born in Paris in 1947 and began his artistic career in Italy after having attended the Paris Academy of Arts,“l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts”. After first exhibitions in France and Italy he got interested in furniture design and for several years worked as consultant for important furniture producers, such as Bernini, Interflex and MatteoGrassi for whom, a part from creating and taking care of the company’s corporate image, he designed his own line of products and worked as art director.

In 1985 he founded Atelier – synthesis of his previous experiences in the design field – for the edition of projects of at that time young designers like Hans-Peter Weidmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Hannes Wettstein as well as those of already famous ones, like Toshiyuki Kita, Ross Littell e Verner Panton. At the same time he re-edited works of famous masters of design, like Alvar Aalto, Alfred Roth, Werner Max Moser and Giuseppe Terragni. In 1993 he created a collection of objects in recycled paper for Arbos, Solagna. In 1997 he created “Glass Works”, a collection of mirrors and in 1998 “Connections”, a collection of art objects which underline the connections between persons and objects by whom he had been influenced.

Since 2000 Toussaint has elaborated a series of installations in-situ which are closely related to the surrounding space and, while creating a sort of estrangement in the spectator, invite to meditation. This part of his work started with the exhibition Tra sogno e realtà in the Arsenal Galleria, Palazzo Branicki in Bialystock (PL), followed by events at the Cocchi Foundations in the Water Towers of Budrio, In Itinere in the deconsecrated Church of San Francesco in Pordenone and the ambitious project …Que du bleu! curated by Luigi Cavadini at the Institut Français Milan.

He has been invited several times to present his work at the Museum Casabianca in Malo, an institution which illustrates the various phases of contemporary international art from 1960 to today through graphic works. Toussaint’s works have been shown in Italy and abroad, some of his projects are present in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum, Die Neue Sammlung, Munich, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin and National Museum of Poznan (PL).