Biography
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was born in Strasbourg, France in 1965. At 17 years old, she worked as a museum guard in Grenoble, France while attending school at École du Magasin of the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Grenoble. She also received education at the Institute des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, in Paris, France. She began her career as an artist in the 1990's, working primarily in film.Her early work was mainly short, minimalistic and oneiric films. She now collaborates on everything from writing a science fiction novel with fellow artist Philippe Parreno to working with rock singer Alain Bashung on set design. She has also collaborated with fashion house Balenciaga in designing displays for their fashion boutiques in New York and Paris. She has even designed a house for a collector in Tokyo. Inspired by film, literature, modernist architecture, and art history, her work is often characterized by a quiet, intimate interrogation of contemporary urban life. Often she will use fragments from her international travels in her work and reassembles them into something new. "My approach to art is quite radical. It has more to do with theater and staging than making objects such as paintings or sculptures. Sometimes I think that the fetishism of objects is pathetic. It's one way to deal with art, but I'm obsessed with other things,". She also hopes that her installations will encourage people to interact with them. "I want to coax people to engage with my art, in the same way that a writer might entice people to read a book,". Dominique is fairly new to US audiences, but is widely acclaimed in Europe. She was the recipient of an artist residency in Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto in 1996, the Mies van der Rohe Award in Krefeld in 1996, and the 2002 Marcel Duchamp award in Paris. For the past seven years, she has spent half of her time at her home Rio de Janeiro with her partner Jérôme Bel, a French choreographer. She first visited the city after traveling to Brasília to make a film about Oscar Niemeyer's architecture. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
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