Jacques Duval-Brasseur

JACQUES DUVAL-BRASSEUR (France, 1934-2021).
Ceiling lamp, ca.1970's.
Gilded brass.
Measurements: 90 x 110 x 110 cm.

This is a rare and singular piece, made in the 1970's by the French sculptor and designer Jacques Duval-Brasseur, according to a style that made him famous, based on the proliferation of gilded steel sheets to create a sculpture with a vegetal theme. Using similar languages, he would develop sculptures of animals, lamps in which he combined gilded metal and precious stones, or using only gilded steel, to which he gave technical textures and organic qualities.

Jacques Duval-Brasseur, born in Tours (Indre-et-Loire) on February 16, 1934 and died in Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) on June 10, 2021, was an artistic personality linked to La Mancha, and a sculptor by profession. After spending part of his childhood in Algiers, at the age of seventeen he broke with his family and returned to France. He enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Cherbourg. These courses confirmed an artistic vocation he had felt since childhood. In the 1960s, he began to work with materials from junkyards and scrapyards, and created his first abstract sculptures with automobile sheet metal and his first insects with moped tanks. In 1966, the Maison & Jardin gallery commissioned four large abstract sculptures, which launched his career. President Giscard d'Estaing commissioned a bucrana (sculpted ornamental motif representing the head of an ox) in polished bronze and Plexiglas horn for the petit salon of the Elysée Palace. Animal representations are omnipresent in Jacques Duval-Brasseur's work. His artistic production is varied: sculptures, furniture, floor lamps, table lamps and small objects of all kinds. Currently, the artist's market value is high, with his various works estimated at between 3,000 and 15,000 euros.