BENOÎT PIÉRON
Born in 1983
Lives & works in Paris

Benoît Piéron works on the creation of moments, installations, and objects exploring the sensuality of plants, the boundaries of the human body, and the temporal nature of waiting rooms. His creative journey encompasses various practices, including patchwork, existential gardening, and wallpaper design.

Having a long-term disease, Benoît Piéron has a very close relationship with the hospital ecosystem. He has developed a practice that not only draws inspiration from this environment but seeks to give plasticity to disease. To do this, Benoît uses as raw material used hospital sheets from different hospital departments. Far from the romantic heroism of the usual metaphors for malady, Piéron places himself in a joyous gray zone. Through his art, he endeavors to explore these uncharted territories, viewing it not as a burden but as a potential source of creative expression.

Central to Piéron's practice are contemplations on the experience of waiting and the complex interplay between health and illness. His work delves into the subtle boundaries that exist between presence and absence, the interior and exterior, the human body and the architectural structures that surround it, and the temporal aspects of medical institutions that mold the patient experience.

Monstera Deliciosa
MUMOK, Vienne
26.10.2023 – 07.01.2024

In his first solo museum exhibition, French artist Benoît Piéron invites us into the kind of a waiting room we are all familiar with from doctors’ offices and hospitals. Piéron’s waiting room is not a place to “kill” time, however, but a site of metamorphosis into which the outside world intrudes in the form of enigmatic objects and images. Snow globes, a chromatic cloudy sky, the play of light and shadow, a water leak, and the figure of a bat turn a forlorn space into a vibrant and lyrical setting.
Curated by Manuela Ammer


© mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, photo: Georg Petermichl

Slumber Party
15/07 - 12/11/2023
Chisenhale Gallery
London, UK.

Slumber Party – Piéron’s first solo exhibition in the UK – applies a vital softness to the harsh uncertainties of life and death, and supplants the often distressing, stale and clinical atmosphere of hospitals with a sense of possibility and renewed imagination.

Cotton sheets that once lined hospital beds in the UK and France are stitched together to create an expansive patchwork canopy. Traces of hospitalised bodies – faded secretions and stains – stretch across the gallery, crafting a collective corpus of matter and memories, and revealing beauty in the discarded.

Anchored by a giant wooden table leg and topped with an oversized pin cushion, the installation plays with scale to evoke the proportions of a domestic den. Linked to the times Piéron has spent in hospitals, throughout his childhood and later life, the space simultaneously becomes a refuge and a portal through which to journey into other realities – a dreamscape that is also a means of survival.

Der Pinkelnde Tod Or What The Dead Do.
Kunstverein Bielefeld
09 septembre - 29 octobre 2023

Liverpool Biennial
uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things
10/06 – 17/09/2023

The 12th edition of Liverpool Biennial ‘uMoya: The sacred Return of Lost Things’ addresses the history and temperament of the city of Liverpool and is a call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing. In the isiZulu language, ‘uMoya’ means spirit, breath, air, climate and wind.

"Exposé.es", Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2023

Paris + par Art Basel, Paris, Oct 2022, © Gregory Copitet

"Horizones", Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2022

↑ Vue d'exposition, Illness shower, Sultana Summer set, Arles, France, 2022
© François Deladerriere

"Cottagecore", Galerie Sultana, Paris, 2022

Benoît Piéron, "[random]", Les Tanneries, Amilly, France, 2018

Le Lit, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, 2011

"La Cabane", 2017