Biography
Edouard Broner – Born in 1971 in Paris – Live and work in Berlin and Paris.
1988 – 1999
- start his graffiti career in the streets and subways of Paris, and travel all over the world on a quest about the upbringing graffiti-art movement, and direct a movie about it.
1998
Director and Producer of the video ,documentary “sous surveillance” Cannes,France
2000
- Director and Producer of the video,documentary “pirates graffiti is not dead”.
2003
- volonteer project and Workshop with the aboriginal artist community Yuendumu , Australia .
- curator of the art club united group show at Cookies for the Art Forum Berlin event.
2004
- solo show at the Russian Culture House Berlin, Germany.
2005
- solo show at lagano, Berlin, Germany
2009
- group show at the urban affairs Berlin, Germany
2010
- group show “T.A.G les lettres de noblesse” – Palais de Tokyo Museum Paris, France
- group show “Un Musée à ciel Ouvert” – Paris, France
2011
- solo show gallery GZ – Paris,France
- group show gallery GZ
Edouard Broner started as a graffiti artist at the age of 17 in the underground scene of Paris. At that time, Paris was a vibrant and influential environment for graffiti art in Europe. From the beginning, Broner viewed graffiti as a sophisticated language with its own grammar, idioms, and hidden meanings. Through extensive travels, he inquired into the nature of the worldwide graffiti and street art movement, in particular its roots in the poor areas of New York City.
Like other fellow artists, Broner felt that the uniqueness of the language of graffiti had been distorted and functionalized by the media, by schools of graphic design, and by large commercial brands. Through his work as a member of the “Ecole de Paris Graffiti”, he opposed to this trivialization of graffiti. For Broner, graffiti is a form of art in the tradition of European painting, though unprecedented in its authentic and exclusively non-scholarly form.
In his paintings, Broner expresses deep emotions exploring his own fears, sorrow, joy by the use of contemporary references and imagery. Often, one finds a tension between naturalistic depictions and abstract, almost formal elements, effects created by the interaction between the different components – As in cubism – the surface often fades into the background, leaving the viewer in a light state of visual discomfort. But His paintings are surprisingly optimistic.
In Broner’s oeuvre, one detects influences from popular culture, bows to the origins of American graffiti as well as hints to the tradition of modern painting and contemporary art . His work also reflects historic events as classical motifs from the history of painting like vanitas.
In a unique style, Broner blends symbolic into pictorial sings by extensive use of colors and foreground-background switches, thus representing his intertextual topics in an aesthetically elaborate way. By exploiting the laws of perception, he intuitively creates a dynamic of rhythms through geometry and color. By creating ambiguity between surface and space, Broner allures to one of the essential topics of painting itself, namely representation.
