Alexandre Gurita

Having experimented with numerous forms of art and found that everything had been done and redone, he gave up the production of artworks entirely in 1998, considering that they hindered his creativity. That same year, he met Ricardo Mbarkho at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA). Together, they experimented with new artistic approaches between 1998 and 2001, which later led to invisual art.

In 1999, Alexandre Gurita asserted that “the work of art is a residual manifestation of being, which in our time has become sub-artistic”. In 1999, he founded the Association pour la propriété intellectuelle de l’être sur lui-même, with Ricardo Mbarkho, Pierre-Yves Fave and Stéphane Augé, envisaging the human being as a work of art in the making. That same year, he registered his life as a work of art with the company Protecréa, which specialises in the registration of works of art. On 23 June 1999, he presented his wedding as his final-year degree project at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA), which threw the school into turmoil and provoked hostility from teachers and from the upholders of artistic orthodoxy. Subsequently, Alexandre Gurita realised that if the artist acts alone, he no longer has the possibility of creating a singular form of art or of having an impact on the definition of art. From then on, it was necessary to act collectively and under the cover of an institution. For this reason, in 2000 the artist captured the Biennale de Paris in order to transform it into a critical institution, placed at the service of any practice freed from the normative regime of art.

Observing practices that fitted into no existing category of art, in 2004 he coined a tailor-made term to characterise them: “invisual art”. Invisual art describes a genre of art in its own right, existing otherwise than in the form of a work of art, whether material or immaterial. According to the art historian Éric Monsinjon, invisual art is defined by what it is not. One of the specific features of invisual art is that it considers the ecosystem of the practice to be an integral part of it. While developing their practice, the invisual artist also devises its economic and strategic model, its terminology, its circuits and modes of dissemination, its audiences, and its multimodal, ecological and collaborative dimension. Its second specific feature lies in considering that artists can work through collective intelligence in a logic of co-construction, following a horizontal approach based on non-competitiveness, similar to team sports or to groups of scientists working together on the same project.

In the field of invisual art, the artist explores lines of enquiry such as institutional capture, the critical institution, transversal economy, multimodality, horizontality, the strategy of water (making do), asymmetry (being where one is not expected), and augmented critique (acting collectively). Institutional capture refers to the act of legally capturing institutions in order to transform them into critical institutions of change. The artist’s three major captures are the Biennale de Paris (2000), the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques (Iheap) (2012), which became the ENDA in 2017, and the Revue de Paris (2020). The artist regards the art system as a working material. He considers that, apart from art as such, two major factors are decisive for its very definition: its economy and its teaching. The artist actively collaborates with other professionals to promote a new vision of art.

The artist has given lectures and led ateliers at venues such as the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Beirut), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Bilbao), Yale School of Art (New Haven), Apexart (New York), Columbia School of Art (New York), Queens Museum of Art (New York), School of Visual Art (New York), the Grand Palais (Paris), the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Paris 1 Sorbonne (Paris).

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