Philippe Berry French, 1956-2019

Philippe Berry was a French sculptor, born in Paris in 1956, and who died in 2019.

Trained at the ESAG Met drawing school in Penninghen, and having worked both as illustrator and designer of movie posters with René Ferracci as a reference, Philippe Berry devoted himself to sculpture from the mid-1980s. Since, bronze had become his material of choice.

His aesthetic is based on an exploration of the world of childhood; approach influenced on the one hand by Comics and more particularly Robert Crumb whom he met in 2018, and on the other hand, by the movements of New Realism and pop art with artists such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Arman, Yves Klein and Andy Warhol.

Through formal proposals that he always wanted to be playful and accessible at any age, the artist also transposed his reflections on technique; question of the technical mastery to which the notions of balance and freedom are attached. Through the idea of ​​a rediscovered pleasure, candid, spontaneous, like the wonder of childhood, the artist has never ceased to seek, question, stage, represent a timeless, iterative and sensory balance.

From the 2000s, these sculptures, developed with a foundryman, were accompanied by colours; like the iridescent colours of barley sugar papers. Thus, his balloons, dinosaurs, elephants, rainbows, splashs and onomatopoeias were both ways of working and poetically sculpting bronze while creating a bridge, a renewal between past and present, a lasting snapshot of childhood, of what remains.

Philippe Berry exhibited his first bronze sculptures at the FIAC in 1993. He produced several monumental sculptures for public, institutional and private commissions, such as in 1997, for Pathé multiplex cinema in Marseille; in 1998 for AFAA (French Agency for Artistic Action) and for the FRAC Réunion. More recently, in 2013, its 6m-high Arc-en-ciel was installed in the park of the ZAC des Docks in St-Ouen; and in 2014, he designed the La Tour Eiffel de ballons for the Sino-French Sculpture Park in Shunde (Guangdong province) in China.

In 2017, following his meeting with the DANA Foundation (created in 2015 under the aegis of the Fondation de France and dedicated to the promotion of actions in favor of children in difficulty), Philippe Berry conducted a workshop opening up to the world of art for the benefit of a group of hospitalized children.