Jean-Marie Krauth

Jean-Marie Krauth (1944-2020) was born in Alsace, a region he left only to set off on long journeys across the world, to the Far East in particular. Intending to become a locksmith, he went to the school of decorative arts in Strasbourg, where he learned to work with iron. Soon, his craftsman’s skills led him to sculpture. In the seventies, he developed a practice somewhere between minimalism and a process of realization of "objects" by a single action (elongation through hammering in the forge, for example), or of geometrical wall "drawings" made using slender rods bent at right-angles, whose dissymmetry produces their position.

Austere work then, and emblematic of a radically sparing use of resources that reflected the artist’s choice of withdrawal and discretion with regard to the art world. In the following years, his artistic activity skewed toward long-term or participatory projects. Que faire ? is made up of dozens of ink stamps collected on his travels, always asking the same question, but in every language he encountered. These stamps were used on all correspondence sent by Mamco between 1999 and 2003.

Jean-Marie Krauth set himself the goal of putting together a full pack from cards he found in the street all over the world. It took him eleven years to gather the 54 cards with mismatched backs. More recently, he produced various artist’s books, published by Ju-Young Kim and comprising, for example, reproductions of movie posters or crime novel covers, whose titles form a sentence when put together.

Far from galleries and art institutions, Jean-Marie Krauth plied his trade in prisons, community gardens or with maintenance crews in companies. His participatory performances were for their protagonists and audiences, not for the press and publicity. The artist embodied his passion for art with complete independence, without ever seeking recognition or economic gain.

In partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse