Un Été au Havre | June 24 - September 17, 2023 | Le Havre, France

Un Été au Havre⁠

June 24 — September 17, 2023

Curated by Gaël Charbau

Carved from stone, two sculptures by Stefan Rinck take their place before the City Hall. It Owl (2021), at a height of 4.3 metres, will be accompanied by Buffalo Croc (2022), a work and bench at the same time. Representatives of the artist’s sculptural work, these two figures evoke various creatures, drawing their inspiration from ancient myths, medieval bestiaries and Aztec legends, though also, iconoclastically, from pop culture, emojis or the history of cinema. Funny, strange and chimerical, Stefan Rinck’s colourful idols blur our contemporary histories and appear to reconcile seemingly contradictory forms and memories.
The artist speaks of a “wild abstraction” to qualify his work, in which history, psychology, rituals, fantasy, magic, aesthetics and manual creation come together to reveal all that we have buried in our subconscious. Technically, his practice is based on the ancient tradition of carving. His works retain a brutalist aura, revealing all the remains of a “fight” against and with the stone as soon as we approach.