François Morelli
50 years of performance
Sunday 1 September 2024, 14 h 00
Arts Sutton Art Center
François Morelli, an award-winning visual artist, invites you to a performative presentation, an immersion into his daily life and travels through videos, photos, and prosthetic objects. He uses drawing as a score, trace, or clue, in an artistic approach rich in paradoxes, addressing, among other things, the notions of ritual, wandering, territory, and resistance.
Biography
Born in Montreal in 1953, François Morelli lived and worked in Greater New York between 1981 and 1990. Recipient of numerous awards and residencies, he also stayed in Paris, Berlin, and Mumbai. He received the Award of Excellence from the Alma Drawing and Printmaking Biennial in 1993; the Louis Comtois Award, jointly presented and managed by the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries and the City of Montreal in 2007; and the Ozias Leduc Award presented by the Émile Nelligan Foundation in 2021. He shares his life with art and design historian Diane Charbonneau and their son, author and artist Didier Morelli.
Approach
François Morelli pursues a multidisciplinary artistic approach (in drawing, printmaking, installation, performance, and sculpture) marked by sustained questioning regarding the status of the object within creative processes and the perception of the artwork. He is interested in the notions of passage, circulation, and transformation. For him, the artwork often echoes a past action or an intervention aimed at translating (not only in space, but also in time) the artist’s relationship with society, individuals with each other, or the individual with the object.
