Kévin Bray, artist and film-maker

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Kévin Bray is another young artist, this time French and working in Amsterdam, I first got to know about through Mamali Shafahi. For some reason I haven't yet worked out, I'm especially drawn to artists who work in a range of media and bring them together in installations: Neïl Beloufa or Jon Rafman, for example. Kévin works in film and video, graphic design, sculpture, sound design and installations... and his production straddles the line between digital and analogue in such a way as to blur the distinction.

I first saw his work 'in real life' in the autumn of 2019, in a little exhibition called 'Morpher III', at FOAM in Amsterdam, and at the Rijksakademie's open days, where his studio was one of only a few I personally found of interest; I met him very briefly, around the same time, as we crossed paths at Amsterdam's central station.

I saw more in Kévin's installation at the Palais de Tokyo's exhibition Future, Former, Fugitive, 'bringing together artists born in France and abroad, living in France or elsewhere (...) born between the 1930s and the 1990s, but who all live and work in and within their era.' The banner image at the head of this blog is one of the works shown there, a 'digital painting' in which a digital image is finished with touches of paint: 'real' brushstrokes.

I was waiting for Kévin's current exhibition, 'Wheels, Wills, Wells', at Future Gallery in Berlin, to write this post about him. The photo heading up this article is the first I found from the Berlin show. On Kévin's Instagram account, the image is animated with changing light effects that highlight the 3D illusion.

This link takes you to Kévin's artist's page at Stigter Van Doesburg in Amsterdam, where he had a solo show, and you can find more images there

This is a link to 'Wheels, Wills, Wells' at Future Gallery. The pages now includes a link to images.

Kévin's Instagram account is here. It has more photos, including the animated version of the one heading up this post, and installation views from an exhibition currently under way in Dordrecht. His YouTube playlist is here, assembling some of his video work.

In the following 2019 clip, Kévin talks about his work:

This is Kévin's Ils se reposent (2019), which I used as a banner image for this blog.



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