Overview
Sans titre, 2025
Sans titre, 2025

Arthur Lemonier, born in 1998, lives and works in Paris. In Arthur Lemonier’s work, one leitmotif persists: resisting the discomfort of confusion.

Arthur Lemonier (born in 1998) is a French painter who lives and works in Paris. His work explores contemporary representations of the body, identity, and emotion through a figurative practice in which ambiguity plays a central role. Drawing on photography, art history, and questions surrounding gender, his compositions depict deliberately indeterminate figures, oscillating between attraction and unease, softness and violence. Rejecting any single interpretation, Arthur Lemonier transforms painting into a space where certainties waver and where the viewer is invited to confront their own perceptions. Represented by Galerie Ketabi Bourdet, he is among the most promising young artists on the contemporary French art scene.

Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Artsy
Works
  • Concerned ?
    Concerned ?
  • Face down ahead II
    Face down ahead II
  • Fluid spot
    Fluid spot
  • Heartache
    Heartache
  • Lay here
    Lay here
  • Les Camons I
    Les Camons I
  • Les Camons II
    Les Camons II
  • Les Camons III
    Les Camons III
  • Les Camons IV
    Les Camons IV
  • Les Camons VI
    Les Camons VI
  • Of self form
    Of self form
  • Sans titre
    Sans titre
  • Seamless mourn
    Seamless mourn
  • Study PBR
    Study PBR
  • Taken as a study, unnamed I
    Taken as a study, unnamed I
  • Taken as a study, unnamed II
    Taken as a study, unnamed II
  • Taken as a study, unnamed III
    Taken as a study, unnamed III
  • Wounded tides
    Wounded tides
  • Sans titre
    Sans titre
  • Sans titre
    Sans titre
Video
Biography
Sans titre, 2025
Sans titre, 2025

Arthur Lemonier (born in 1998) lives and works in Paris. Trained in the visual arts, he has developed a painting practice over several years that examines mechanisms of perception, constructions of identity, and representations of the body. For him, painting becomes a territory of uncertainty where emotions, genders, and appearances remain deliberately unstable.

 

At the heart of his work lies a fascination with confusion. Far from being an obstacle, it constitutes the very driving force of his practice. Arthur Lemonier constructs images in which forms are distorted, colours overlap, and faces evade any stable definition. This deliberate ambiguity invites the viewer to question their own categories of interpretation and to embrace the complexity of contemporary identities.

 

Photography occupies an essential place in his creative process. Whether working from self-portraits or images of people close to him, it serves as a starting point for a painting practice profoundly transformed by gesture, material, and colour. References to Otto Dix, Francis Bacon, and other figures of contemporary painting engage with a distinctly contemporary sensibility, shaped by questions of fluidity, representation, and marginality.

 

His early portrait series already explored tensions between desire, vulnerability, and repulsion. With Sick Shifts, presented in 2025, his research expands around notions of transidentity, intersex variations, androgyny, and the multiple forms of symbolic violence exerted on marginalised bodies. The body appears as a space of perpetual transformation, liberated from traditional categories of gender and identity.

 

Since 2024, Galerie Ketabi Bourdet has closely supported his development through several solo exhibitions, notably La Petite Morsure and Sick Shifts, while also presenting his work at various international fairs and projects. This collaboration reflects a commitment to supporting a new generation of French painters whose work is reshaping the concerns of contemporary figuration.

Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Press
Exhibitions
Bibliography
Arthur Lemonier (b. 1998)

Selected Bibliography

  • The Steidz — On a aimé : Arthur Lemonier chez Ketabi Bourdet.
  • Technikart — Entre l'extase et l'agonie.
  • Fetch — I'm Not Interested in Flesh-Coloured Faces.
  • Canard's Closet — Sick Shifts: Arthur Lemonier's Vision of the Unbound Body.

 

Exhibitions

  • Ketabi Bourdet, Paris
  • TM Projects, London
  • Spazio Favilla, Cervia (Italy)
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