Each year, Maison Ruinart commissions an international contemporary artist for a carte blanche exhibition paying tribute to its history, heritage, savoir-faire and champagne cellars (listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site). After Liu Bolin in 2018 and Vik Muniz in 2019, this year's carte blanche has been given to the British artist David Shrigley (b.1968).
Shrigley is an artist with a signature style whose work (drawings, sculpture, photography and neon installations) takes on elements of everyday life with incomparable irony. His illustrations and drawings incorporate absurd phrases and sentences, using humor—from the naive to noir—as his high-precision weapon of choice. With his sharp gaze, Shrigley has honed in on Maison Ruinart’s singularity and added his own mark, quite literally, by scribbling graffiti onto the chalk walls of its emblematic cellars.
With the exhibition Unconventional Bubbles, Shrigley’s work will be unveiled on 6 March 2020 in a “hidden room” of the Opera Bastille (Paris) and then exhibited at the 37 international contemporary art fairs that Maison Ruinart has officially partnered with in 2020.
