Julien Prévieux (b. 1974, Grenoble, France) lives and works in Paris. Work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the-art technologies, and the culture industry are the many “worlds” that his activities touch upon. As in the Lettres de non-motivation (Letters of Non-Application) that he has been sending out to employers regularly since 2004—in which he responds to
newspaper advertisements and details his reasons for not applying for the jobs in question—his work often appropriates the vocabulary, mechanisms, and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed, the better to highlight their dogmas, excesses, and, when all is said and done, their vacuity. By shrewdly adopting the stance of an individual facing whole swaths of society that are in many respects dehumanized, Prévieux develops a strategy of counter-productivity, or what the philosopher Elie During called, in a recent essay about the artist’s practice, “counter-employment.”
Prévieux has had solo exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015), Galerie Showcase, Grenoble, France (2013), Galerie de l’École des Beaux-arts de Rouen, France (2012), Maison Populaire, Montreuil, France (2011), Jousse Entreprise, Paris (2011), Médiathèque de Tarnos, France (2011), Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers, France (2011), Le Théâtre – Scène conventionnée de Laval, France (2011), Bibliothèque Simone-de-Beauvoir, Rouen, France (2011), centre d’art contemporain, Montélimar, France (2010), Galerie West, the Hague, the Netherlands (2010), École supérieure d’art de Grenoble, France (2009), L’Antenne du Plateau, Paris (2009), Centre d’art contemporain, La synagogue de Delme, France (2008), and Domaine de Kerguéhennec, centre d’art contemporain, Bignan, France (2008). He has recently participated in group exhibitions at Musée Jean-Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, Angers, France (2015), La Centrale, Brussels (2015), CentrePasquArt, Bienne, Switzerland (2015), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2015), Centre Pompidou Málaga, Spain (2015), Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2015), Musée d’Art et d’Industrie Saint- Étienne, France (2015), Cankarjev dom, Culture and Congress Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2015), Centre national d’art contemporain de la Villa Arson, Nice, France (2015), FIAC 2014, Paris (2014), and Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2014). He was the winner of the 2014 Prix Marcel Duchamp.
