Baptiste Croze

Baptiste Croze was born in 1985, he lives and works in Lyon (FR).

Baptiste Croze scours and collects objects, drawn to them for their shapes, colors, or unusual modes of being. He then takes pleasure in diverting these objects, upending their meanings, removing them from their initial and respective contexts, and destabilizing our own cultural and internalized norms and representations.

This diversion often happens through the nesting or combining of objects. They merge into a “vocabulary of forms,” giving rise to new and often unexpected phrases and representations. For his dépouilles (“remains”), Baptiste Croze set out on a treasure (or witch?) hunt, gathering molds and revealing their interiors through a technique of reversal. The original forms fade away, others begin to appear, colliding with our own perceptions.

Baptiste Croze’s gestures can be ephemeral, rooted in a limited temporality—like saws flipped into empty space. Often, he creates protocols, implemented in series, each defined by a set of empirical and poetic rules and frameworks.

He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at La Permanence, Clermont-Ferrand (2015), the Hall des Humanités at INSA Lyon (2014), Chez Néon and the Musée des Moulages in Lyon (2014). He regularly exhibits in France and abroad, including at the Collection Lambert in Avignon (2008 and 2016), the Institut Français of Sfax, Tunisia (2016), the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole—in resonance with the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul (2015), and the Magasin in Grenoble (2013), among others.

Baptiste Croze holds a DNSEP (National Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts, 2009) and a DNAP (National Diploma in Fine Arts, 2007) from the École Supérieure d’Art de Grenoble. He participated in an Erasmus exchange at Sabancı University and interned at Platform Garanti, an art center in Istanbul (2008). Baptiste Croze contributes to the online archive Documents d’artistes Rhône-Alpes (2016). He received the Visual Arts Grant from the City of Grenoble (2013) and has taken part in several residency programs: the AIR/Antwerpen exchange, Artistes‑en‑résidence (2015), and Moly Sabata (2012 and 2014).

Baptiste Croze’s work is on display during the exhibition Actuellement en résidence #3 - Crête a creux, 2016.