NEWS


2024.11.30 au 2025.11.30
I’m presenting some sculptures from the Tubulus and Syndrome series for the Experience Pommery #18 exhibition in Reims. The exhibition will last about a year.
Exhibition curator: Fabrice Bousteau
Opening January 21 at Maison Pommery.
This is a series of bronze sculptures that I like to think of as a collection of portraits – if I’d been a pipeline. The biomorphic forms recall the organic origins of oil, while their sensual curves embody resistance, dispersing the energy of the viscous flows that pass through them and forming complex, self-coiling structures. At the crossroads of industrial infrastructure and anthropomorphic organic forms, these sculptures reveal our deep entanglement with the systems that sustain modern life. By diverting regular flows into labyrinths of entangled curves, they expose the complexity of our dependence, transforming the efficiency of distribution into a resistance turned in on itself.
Thanks to curator Fabrice Bousteau, Nathalie Vranken, Galerie Trépanier Baer and the entire Pommery Champagnes team.

2024.10.04
Tensile Body
is now installed at the Jing’an Sculpture Park in Shanghai, China.
With many thanks to
Yoojin Tang, Jing Cheng, and the entire UCCA Lab team.
Tensile Body
is a sculpture based on the principle of tensegrity, where seemingly delicate branches are connected in a state of constant tension and compression. This balance reflects natural systems, particularly the human body, where muscles and tendons connect the skeleton to maintain mobility. In this work, each element contributes to overall stability, symbolizing the importance of mutual support within any community or system. The piece evokes a sense of resilience and vulnerability, inviting reflection on the invisible forces that bind things together. Presented as part of the public sculpture exhibition “Echoes Among Us” at Jing’an Sculpture Park 2024 (Shanghai), this sculpture becomes a metaphor for the cohesion that sustains both natural ecosystems and urban infrastructures, emphasizing the vital role each component plays in the whole.

2024.09.08 to 2024.09.20
I’m honoured to be invited to be a part of the the 26th edition of the Parle-moi d’amour exhibition at the Université de Québec at Montréal. Opening November 1.
Salle polyvalente du Coeur des sciences de l’UQAM Pavillon Sherbrooke
200 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal

2021.11.19. au 2022.02.13
The 5th International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN), organized by ELEKTRA
Arsenal Montreal
As part of the 5e Biennale d’art numérique Elektra, I present Castles made of sand, for the first time to a Montreal audience. It is an assembly line that rebuilds sand castles destroyed by celestial influence.After having infiltrated the 68th floor of the BMO bank tower in Toronto, the installation “Castles made of sand” had entered the imaginary world of the financial institution. It was like an industrial production line dedicated to the desperate construction of sandcastles. The paradox of production is pushed to its limit: in this line, destruction is an integral part of the process. The machine works in a closed circuit, using the product of its destruction as building material. The sandcastles are made and unmade endlessly, without fatigue.

NEWS ARCHIVES
2024.11.30 au 2025.11.30
Tubulus et Syndrome
Experience Pommery #18, Reims
2024.10.04
Tensile Body
Jing'an Sculpture Park, Shanghai, China
2023.09.08 au 2023.09.20
Parle-moi d'amour
Université de Québec à Montréal, Montréal
2021.11.19. au 2022.02.13
The 5th International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN), organized by ELEKTRA
Arsenal Montreal
2021.05.08 - 2021.06.07
Ruhr Ding: Climate
Urbane Künste Ruhr, Germany
2020.02.09 - 2020.08.30
La main du magicien dans la froide lumière du jour
Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides, Canada
2020.06.25 - 2020.11.08
Zero Emission
Museum Leipzig, Germany
2020.03.17
Courant Vert
Espace EDF, Paris
2020.02.11 - 2020.05.12
Thresholds
Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Canada
2019.10.31 - 2019.12.08
Montréal ~ Habana : Rencontres en art actuel / Encuentros de Arte Contemporáneo
Havana, Cuba
2019.09.09
Poetry Lies In Between
CityLeaks Festival Center, Cologne, Germany
2019.05.20 - 2019.05.24
CoExistence
2019 ICRA-X Robotic Art Program, Palais des congrès de Montréal, Canada
2019.05.04 - 2019.07.13
Revolution
Biennale d’architecture et de paysage Versailles, Paris
2019.03.08 - 2019.04.13
Salle des maquettes
Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal
2019.02.07 - 2019.05.18
Bonne conduite
Angoulême, France (FRAC Poitou-Charentes)
NEWS ARCHIVES

TEXTS


Thresholds
Nathalie Bachand, Canada Council for the Arts

Thresholds is an experience in transit. It calls to mind the velocity of our urban journeys, small moments in everyday time and space. The installation remakes the internal mechanics of door-opening devices found on old metro cars manufactured for the inauguration of the Montréal metro at the 1967 World Exhibition. The MR-63 car has now been replaced by more modern equipment, but its impact on the collective Montréal imagination is undeniable.

Between the Possible and the Impossible
Nathalie de Blois, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec

For more than ten years, Michel de Broin has been honing a trans-disciplinary art which calls systems and their articulation into question. Adopting a critical and playful attitude towards common objects and current ideas, he sets out to render visible, through richly profound metaphors and analogies, the forces at work in the movement of the energies which guide our actions and govern our impulses.

Sculpture of Steel, City of Nerves
Bernard Schütze, Espace art actuel

Dendrites, a public artwork recently inaugurated along with its sit — Place de l’Aviation Civile International, is a fascinating and consistent extension of Michel de Broin’s ongoing and prolific art practice. In fact the work combines two elements that are characteristic of his multifaceted approach.

Michel de Broin at Bitform Gallery
Darren Jones, Artforum

Michel de Broin’s US solo debut activates cracked lightbulbs, wood logs, bronze castings, and a bicycle with electric currents. The Montreal-based artist calls upon these basic objects to convey fundamental physical forces, all the while adding a trace of whimsy to his works.

Michel de Broin
Bryne McLaughlin, Art in America

There's a dizzy logic to the work of Montreal artist Michel de Broin. Take, for instance, his sculpture Révolution, a maquette version of which opened his recent survey exhibition at the MACM. Commissioned in 2010 for the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, France, the massive work (which remains in France) features a knotted, 100-foot-long steel staircase designed to confound notions of beginning and end.

Michel de Broin BMO Project Room
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art

There is no beginning and no end to Michel de Broin's Castles Made of Sand (2016). Installed high above the Toronto financial district as the most recent commission for the BMO Project Room, de Broin's hulking installation pivots on a simple conceptual proposition: how to construct a machine that builds and rebuilds sandcastles.

Disruption From Within
Rodney LaTourelle, Plug-In ICA

For his first solo exhibition in Western Canada, Michel de Broin presents recent work in various media. His art may take many forms, from traditional sculpture to installations, actions, and video, but it always employs a rupture in the logic of a particular convention, whether it is an object, situation, or process. Perversions, detours, and odd juxtapositions are strategies that repeatedly appear in his work, which uses the combination of unrelated systems in order to expose overlooked preconceptions.

A Logic of Being Against?
Bernard Lamarche, Parachute

Resistance is born of one force’s thwarted affections for another... It does not confront the enemy in order to inflict defeat upon it but struggles with adversity, for which the adversary is only a stand-in, in order to weaken it and make it give in...

Interview
Michel de Broin, Etienne Zack, Mass MoCA

I recently carried out a performance involving a lumberjack and a lamppost. The historical movement known as “The Age of Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason,” to which Newton belonged, translates to “the Century of Light” in French, light being a synonym of reason and darkness suspected of belonging to witchcraft and magic.

@ Véronique Ducharme, 2018

Michel de Broin deepens his artistic practice by exploring the intersections between circulation systems, functional and crafted objects, as well as invisible materialities. His works disrupt established logics of use, revealing the tensions between technical efficiency and the inherent fragility of the structures he interrogates.

By manipulating materials and objects, de Broin extracts their latent potential, transforming them into hybrid and repurposed entities that generate new meanings. Through a reevaluation of norms, he highlights the dynamics of energy flows, cycles of transformation, and resistance, conveying porous contradictions that invite reflection.

His work engages matter as a vector of complex interrelations, where emptiness, excess, and residue act as active forces. These elements enable a rethinking of the porosity between notions of form and formlessness. Michel de Broin thus explores systems in their contingency, their potential for failure, and their breaking points, where objects transcend their primary utility to become spaces for poetic and critical speculation.

His work has been exhibited at the Biennale de Lyon,  Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne; France; the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; the Museum Tinguely, Basel; the Centre d’art Villa Arson, Nice; at Eyebeam, New York; and at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York. His work is held in several museums and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; the City of Montreal; the FRAC Poitou Charentes, France; and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Germany.

His public art works and commissions include Dendrites, 2017, Montreal; Threshold, 2017, Montréal; Interlude, 2016, Québec city; Bloom, 2015, Calgary;  Possibilities, 2012, Mississauga; Interlace, 2012, Changwong; Majestic, 2011, New Orleans; Revolution, 2010, Rennes; Arch, Montréal, 2009; La maîtresse de la Tour Eiffel, 2009, Paris; Overflow, 2008, Toronto; Encircling, Christchurch, 2006; Shared Propulsion Car, 2005, New York and 2007, Toronto; Révolutions, 2003, Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier, Montréal.

Recipient of the 2007 Sobey Art Award, de Broin has also received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, the Harpo Foundation (Los Angeles) and Krasner-Pollock Foundation (New York), and was awarded a residency at International Studio and Curatorial Program (New York), the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Acme studio (London) and Villa Arson(Nice).

He is represented by the Galerie Blouin Division, Montreal.

Selective CV