Valéry Grancher (born 1967 April 22 in Toulon, Var, France) is a French Internet-based artist, performer, theorist, curator and lecturer.
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Grancher is best known for selling Internet art in the contemporary art mainstream.
Grancher's art is a mix of conceptual and pop art references, sometimes with a sense of humour, sometimes appropriating the fads of the day.
When Grancher started in the art world in 1995, he used emails in his art to show the processes and exchanges of the Internet community (email art) in physical installations like 'Alone' (1995). In 1997 he used webcams in his project 'webscape', which dealt with the concept of "cybertime." [1] In 1998, Grancher experimented with pop art in his 'webpaintings' project.[2] In 2002, as Google began to dominate the Internet, he launched the "Search Art" collaborative project by creating a piece called 'Self Portrait.' [3]
In 2005 he exhibited and sold at FIAC, the international art fair in Paris, 'the biggest Google paintings never (sic) produced.'
Since the mid-1990s, Grancher has exhibited at many museums worldwide, including:
Grancher has also exhibited his work in private art galleries, including:
Ubiquity is a constant focus in science fictions novels, especially Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Grancher, regarding this literature, conceived and invented the concept of Cybertime: This virtual time is a kind of temporal collage done with webcams from across the world through networks. Webscape (1998), is focusing the real time multiplicity to react against the perspective view based on one space, one temporality.
On 1998, Valery Grancher started "Webpaintings", an ironic production regarding conceptual painting, net.art academism and pop art This project has influenced several artists such as Carlo Zanni on 2001, Miltos Manetas on 2002 and Exonemo on 2003 [4]
The Google paintings were a sold out at the FIAC but on the other hand, there was a big misunderstanding in the art market regarding these productions: His art gallery fired Valery Grancher .
On 1998 The Cartier Foundation for contemporary art in Paris has formalized with Valéry Grancher the selling of a net.art piece to an international contemporary art museum. It was a command regarding the "Being nature" collective show curated by Hervé Chandès and Hélène Kelmachter. This piece is based on an interaction with the people who are connected to the website: Emails and words are associated with pictures shot on real time in Antarctica. Most of his project are based at this time on this kind of interactions (emails solicitations) and has influenced deeply the French art scene with artists such as (Tamara Laï, Nicolas Frespech, Annie Abrahams, Christophe Bruno...).
Valéry Grancher is extending his nomadism towards the space conquest... He has bought three territories on the moon closed to the Gassendi crater. These territories are the origin of a piece called "Longitude 38" where three webcams situated 18° South and 38° West are focusing these territories and sending pictures on real time to the web... Longitude 38 is also a fiction composed with texts, images and sketches: The screen is done with two frames facing each others: On the left side, a project of a mission toward the moon; then on the right side, different documents from the NASA regarding the moon conquest missions history. On one side we have the imagery of an artist and on the other side we have the precision of the technical and scientific documents from NASA. Longitude 38 is participating to the utopias history in between the mental space and the geographical space which is the relation from reality to fiction. This piece was a command from the Cartier Foundation for contemporary arts during the collective show called "One real world". This show was focusing the imagery of the 20th century and his links to reality. Longitude 38 is facing art and science and is questioning The permanent tele-epistemology of our society...
This piece was conceived on line on 2000. It's showing life samples caught during 24 hours. It was done with the participation of 24 students from UC Berkeley and was inspired by the book of Roland Barthes La chambre claire. 24h00 is playing with 24 epiphanies based on time and experiences. After having synchronised their watches, the student has shot 24 pictures from 12 am to 12 am the day after during 24 hours. This piece was shown at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive.
Science Fiction is worming one's way into daily life, "Heart Time / Time Heat" is offering a clock based on heart rhythm: no earth attraction, no earth travel around the sun, this clock is sending you in deep universe.
Produced for Less Ordinary, a French Art Scene (curator Sungwon Kim) at the Artsonje Contemporary Art Center on June April 2002 in Seoul. Chill Out is an interactive installation done with one red circular carpet with colourful pillows where peoples have to lay down and relax. The peoples were able to experiment different projects based on WAP technology: They were receiving on their mobile phone text messages with instructions regarding gestures and actions they have to do... But these actions were foolish and absurd. In Asia, the mobile phone is a kind of very personal fetish (individual mental miror). This installation also reproduces the place in the korean home where kids and parents lay down to play video games, and it questions Korean daily life regarding telecom technologies...
This piece was done for the same show in Korea « Less Ordinary, a French Art Scene » (curator Sungwon Kim) at the Artsonje Contemporary Art Center on June April 2002 in Seoul. 6 robots (3 crabs and 3 cockroach) are paralysed in the darkness inside a rectangle 1,20m x 1,80m. When someone is focusing on them a light torch, the robots are running after the light spot. When the light is off, the robots are frozen: this installation is dealing with a kind of behaviourism "Does our world run after much more light and technology?"
"Found sculpture" is directly linked to Marcel Duchamp concepts such as "ready made". A "found sculpture" may be an object directly linked to human skill or technology.