Born in Toulouse in 1982, Guillaume Bresson lives and works in New York (USA).
In 2007, Guillaume Bresson graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris with distinction. His work questions the notions of staging and narrative in painting. He came to the attention of the public with Dynasty, an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris held in 2010 - the year in which he also received the Sciences-Po Prize for Contemporary Art. Having participated in 2016-2017 in the Residency Unlimited programme, he currently lives in New York after a residency at the FLAX Foundation in Los Angeles in 2020.
Bresson's work has been shown in numerous international institutions such as the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (Germany, 2011), the Curitiba Biennial (Brazil, 2011), the Perm Museum (Russia, 2012), l'Institut du Monde arabe (Paris, 2015), la Collection Lambert in Avignon (France, 2015), the ArtSpace Boan in Seoul (South Korea, 2016), the Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard (France, 2018), Domaine Pommery (Reims, 2018), the French Institute Alliance française (New York, 2019), the Centre Pompidou (in a group show Dust, The Plates of Present, 2020).
Bresson was chosen in 2015 by Olivier Py, the Director of the Avignon Festival to embody the poster of one of the world's greatest performing arts Festival and to benefit from a personal exhibition in Avignon's renown Célestins Church.
Bresson was selected the same year by the board of Patrons of "Les Nouveaux Commanditaires" to create a polyptych for the RedStar soccer team, which became the emblem of the club and was shown in several group shows including La Grande Galerie du Foot (Grande Halle de la Villette de Paris, France, 2016) ; Le Sport est un Art (Centre d'art contemporain, Meymac, France, 2017) and Par Amour du jeu (Magasins Généraux, Pantin, France, 2018). Guillaume Bresson's works have been reproduced in numerous articles and exhibition catalogues. In 2019, two of the artist's large scale paintings were chosen to be reproduced for the set of Clement Cogitore's Les Indes Galantes opera at the Opera Bastille in Paris.
The painter has been the subject of two monographic publications : Guillaume Bresson published by Editions Dilecta in 2012 and Guillaume Bresson, Red Star Football Club by Presses du Réel in 2016. In 2017, Guillaume Bresson receives the Pierre Cardin Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the painting section before being awarded the Del Duca Painting Prize in 2020, on the occasion of a collective exhibition of the winners at the Institut de France.
Guillaume Bresson's works are present in numerous private and public collections notably those of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Louis Vuitton collection and the MUDAM Luxembourg and the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse, each of which holds one of his major works. Drawings by the artist are also present in the collections of the Cabinet Jean Bonna of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
In 2019, the artist enjoyed his first solo exhibition in the United States at the invitation of the French Institute Alliance Française in New York. In the same year, he was part of a group show on figurative painting Les Enfants du Paradis at the MUBA in Tourcoing (France), as part of the Lille 3000 art event entitled L'Eldorado (curators: Jean-Max Colard and Jérôme Sans). In 2020, the Couvent des Cordeliers in Toulouse hosted a solo exhibition of the artist's frescoes.
Guillaume Bresson has been represented by la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2010.
Via a system of representation derived from the teachings of Italian Renaissance and French Classicism, Guillaume Bresson portrays contemporary subjects-his striking depictions of society shift toward a form of oneiric lyricism, which, rather than rejecting the social world, transfigures it.
The corps-a-corps, a constant theme in Guillaume Bresson's oeuvre, is presented across a variety of settings that are more or less identifiable, more or less familiar or abstract: suburbia, a laundromat, the domestic environment of a kitchen, snowy woods that recall Pieter Brueghel the Elder's wintry landscapes, a stormy sea.
His work process is characterized by perspective grids that remain apparent in the large paintings on canvas; smaller preparatory studies realized after sittings held with amateur models, which he subsequently rearranges at will. The artist also experiments with a photographic transfer technique, which constitutes the starting point of several paintings. Within the paintings themselves, certain areas remain untouched, in contrast with highly detailed parts. This too contributes to a creative painting process that also becomes the very subject itself: Guillaume Bresson's paintings feed on the voids, which confer a deep and silent aura to the depicted scenes.
This highly contrasted work shows a distressing social reality, portrayed at times explicitly and at others symbolically: that of disinherited or marginalized people (often placed off- center on the painting itself), stooped under the weight of life or already lying on the ground, reminiscent of a descent from the cross transposed inside a crashing wave under a twilight sky. The result evokes contemporary migratory tragedies. While human contact is omnipresent in Guillaume Bresson's work and takes for example the shape of two young girls in profile, whose physical proximity brings to mind Giotto's kiss, its absence is all the more remarkable in the way he paints the kind of existential isolation that prevails in often deserted areas. The theme of violence, recurrent in Guillaume Bresson's oeuvre, once again finds its full expression, yet its very ambiguity is more conspicuous than ever.
Through a style of painting characterized by parallels and deviations, Guillaume Bresson subtly thwarts expectations and manages to magnify his subjects, while always remaining true to a sort of contemporary realism, to which he confers its proper and masterful form.