Guillaume Bresson - Versailles

From 21 January to 25 May 2025, the Palace of Versailles is presenting an exhibition by the contemporary artist Guillaume Bresson, a leading light of French figurative painting.

Guillaume Bresson creates hyperrealist paintings featuring characters involved in street fights that reference religious and history painting. The artist’s works will be exhibited in the Africa Rooms and will therefore engage in dialogue with large battle scenes from the colonial conquests of Louis-Philippe.

 

Historical yet contemporary work

 

Guillaume Bresson’s paintings are characterized by their realism. In order to achieve this photographic accuracy, the painter follows a process beginning with preparatory photoshoots in his studio using models. Their bodies are choreographed, creating poses and theatricalized movements that are reminiscent in some respects of Baroque painting. In the editing process, the artist isolates and detaches the bodies and then rearranges them into a group. In this way, Guillaume Bresson constructs paintings in which body language plays a central role in the creation of the narrative.

 

The exhibition at the Palace of Versailles

 

The exhibition of works by Guillaume Bresson will be held in the Africa Rooms of the Palace of Versailles. These rooms, with their grand decorative schemes installed under Louis-Philippe, showcase huge paintings depicting battles of the colonial conquest of North Africa in the 1830s and 1840s. In this counterpoint between the historic paintings, notably by Horace Vernet, and works by Guillaume Bresson, battlefields and urban guerillas are contrasted and challenge the visitor to consider how violence is presented in painting.